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The software documentation for people new to it is awful. The hardware is probably great, but I've had such a hard time with mine. It's not newbie friendly at
by tibbon 7y ago
The software documentation for people new to it is awful. The hardware is probably great, but I've had such a hard time with mine.
It's not newbie friendly at all, and the people in HAM and SDRs don't know how to teach. It's all jargon that they never define or things just like "Oh do XYZ in this software" and that's an entirely non-obvious thing that's entirely undocumented with no tutorials.
- rachelbythebay 7y agoA lot of SDR stuff is like you're a person wanting to drive to the store to get some ice cream so you can eat the ice cream. So they give you the blueprints.. to an auto factory. So you can build an auto factory. Which will then build a car. Which you can THEN drive to the store. Hope there's still ice cream left by the time you get there.
- jcims 7y agoIf there's a silver lining, you do learn a lot whether you planned to or not (mostly about how much more other people know than you do). I first dipped my toes into it with the RTL SDRs back when they were first 'discovered'. I got into listening to local police scanners but got tired of chasing peaks in the spectrum. So I learned a little bit about DSP, wrote a couple of little auto-tuner plugins for one of the more popular SDR applications, built a crude audio pipeline to demodulate the p25, but ultimately had a $1200 PC doing a bad job at being a $200 scanner. I started to pick it apart more when some genius masochist builds an SDR scanner that does all of the above (including multi-vcos), but then snips out the audio files, tags them with the origin and makes them available for the world to listen via a nice clean web ui. Demoralized and defeated I just moved on to tinker with ADS-B. Geesh, the nerve of some people. :D