RTL SDR USB stick + PDW

[pete_uk]

Thats a mouth full of acronyms

I have a RTL SDR USB stick which I use with SDR#, feeding audio via a virtual audio cable into PDW to decode POCSAG pagers.

Generally, when I first start it up its decoding at 100% but after a while that starts to go slowly down and the text being decoded gets more and more garbled. All I have to do is briefly stop SDR# (not actually stopping the programme but press 'stop' then 'play') and the decoding rises back to 100% again. I had wondered if the temperature of the stick was having an effect on something but I'm not so sure.

Anyone have any other ideas??

[Mototrbo2020]

Yes or your pc running low on memory.

[pete_uk]

Thought it might be. I have 16GB of RAM so cant be that!

[Mototrbo2020]

Most likely the stick overheating, they are cheap as.

[bertonumber1]

Hi there,

A bit late.. i use an rsp1a and vhf whip to a raspberry pi 4b and virtualhere usb ip.

The setup is in my loft with around 12 inches of lmr400 coax to decode pdw.

The same idea with another RSP sitting on the Navtex 490-518khz frequencies is also in the loft to decode navtex broadcasts. All this runs on a Esprimo 8gb minipc (along with shiplotter, planeplotter and sdruno) with no problems at all.

As the other bloke said the so called "tv dongles" are cheap as chips and tend to overheat on the 5v contiuous usb power which in turn affects performance of the radio.

I would highly recommend the RSP1A at least if youre going to mess around with SDR. the smaller cheaper dongles are ok for some things but not more sensitive decoding.

Hope you get it sorted

Regards

[dc260]

Most likely the stick overheating, they are cheap as.

I have several nooelec rtl-sdrs, I run them 24/7 to log various DMR frequencies to file and I have never once run into a problem with them overheating, yes they do get hot however they have a temperature controlled oscillator to stop frequency shifting. I am unaware however how the tv dongles are in comparison as the rtl-sdr nooelecs have additional circuitry despite being based on the same chip.