This clumsy Analog to Digital Converter / USB
interface Chip, does not have the Audio dynamic range needed for my
purposes.
That's because it's only designed for FM radio. Anything more would have been
overkill for the manufacturer's purposes. This is still excellent value for
$20 and hasn't been much of a stumbling block for what most people have been
doing so far.
The infuriating predilection it has to crash every
time you want
to shift frequency is another disadvantage.
I'm not sure where you're looking in the docs, but if you're using
Balint's
USRP ExtIO (as oppposed to the - I think - Osmocom ExtIO) then there are two
sets of code for the tuner. The default one offers slightly wider frequency
range, but crashes as you have seen. If you add "tuner=e4k" to the device
hint then it will switch to the newer code, which doesn't crash, at the
expense of having some gaps in the frequency coverage.
First, I attached a high gain audio amplifier's
input directly to the
Tuner's output then to a 96K Sample per Second, 24 Bit Audio card to observe
a high quality spectral image from the tuner.
Presumably this reduces your bandwidth from 3.2MHz to 96kHz, which is 24kHz
too low to properly receive wideband/consumer FM radio. Since many people are
using the RTLSDR has a kind of glorified RF scanner, I am wondering whether
you're trying to do something you really should be doing on a high end device
like the USRP?
Next is to hack into and record the I2C sent to the
Tuner, so it may be
controlled independent of that infuriating RTL2832. If anyone has done this,
please share your code and understanding.
Don't quote me on this but AFAIK the RTL just passes the I2C commands through
unchanged. This is how the existing E4000 tuner code was able to be adapted
to the RTL2832 so quickly.
This list probably isn't the best place to ask about this sort of thing - it's
mostly developers focused on improving the hardware rather than getting people
started with it. I strongly recommend switching to the ultra-cheap-sdr
list[1] instead, which has many more people able to help beginners. Your
question about the device crashing is answered quite often, for example.
These people can also point you to the many 'getting started' guides, which do
explain clearly with screenshots where to put device hints and the like.
Cheers,
Adam.
[1]
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ultra-cheap-sdr (you can subscribe via
e-mail here if you don't want to use the web interface)