heh ... well it may be a waste, but it was an honest waste: it was the
cheapest PC-USB FM radio offered on an ebay auction ($14 shipping included)
and I'd already tried several USB-cable FM radios that turned out to be
completely useless for various reasons, and even wal-mart can't sell a
decent FM radio these days for even twice that price, so it seemed like a
reasonable gamble, and as it is, I've now (a) discovered the whole SDR
phenomenon and (b) learned that I might someday get FM, CB, police and
weather all from this one device that as it turns out, I didn't really need
because pulseaudio can do what I originally needed.
so I'm not complaining, I'm just looking in on wide-eyed naivity bewildered
by the great vistas that now open before me :)
and now you'll have to excuse me, I'm off to google HDSDR :)
On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 9:13 PM, Adam Nielsen <a.nielsen(a)shikadi.net> wrote:
From what I understand, the digital TV standard here
in Canada is
different
from DVB-T (I am a complete neophyte at all of this) and so that
particular
feature of the device won't be of much use to me, but as for the FM, I'm
on
the Ubuntu/Linux GNU platform, so I'm awaiting on the kindness of
strangers to
perfect the kernel drivers enough to match the Windows kit performance.
But
that's okay, because I'm learning a lot in the process :)
The DVB-T option isn't much use to anyone, because we all bought the
device for SDR purposes :-) No disrespect, but wanting to use the device
just for FM radio is a bit of a waste - you have the Swiss Army Knife of
radio receivers, but you only want to use the corkscrew?
Just for the record, there are no kernel drivers for the SDR side of
things, it's all done in userspace. This userspace code, developed by
people on this list, is designed to operate under Linux and it then gets
ported to Windows. So luckily for you, running Linux means you'll always
have easy access to the latest userspace driver code, before it gets to
Windows.
Unfortunately so much SDR software is Windows only, especially the
packages aimed at beginners like myself, who don't know enough about RF yet
to get any GNURadio flow graphs working.
Personally the best I have done so far is to run HDSDR under Wine, and use
the Linux BorIP server to pass data (via loopback TCP) between Wine and the
RTL device. This allows HDSDR to run pretty much the same as it does under
Windows.
But of course HDSDR can't quite do FM radio (since it only goes up to
96kHz), but it does work really well for receiving other NBFM and AM
broadcasts (police, aircraft, etc.)
Cheers,
Adam.
--
*Have Blog, Will Travel: blog.teledyn.com*
*A Serviceable Substitute: post.teledyn.com*