Airspy Black Friday Deals Now Active

Doh ! I bought an Airspy Mini one month ago, I should have waited one more month to make my purchase !
Or I should just NOT have bought an Airspy !

You see, I wanted to upgrade from my “classic” RTL-SDR V3 (which works perfectly), and 5 MHz BW and 12 Bits ADC sounded like a step up, well…
Just plugged my freshly received Mini, “Drivers not found”, so much for the seemingly Plug&Play… (Desktop W7 specially installed for radio stuff)

Installed the drivers and eagerly launched SDR#, well I wanted to test it on a trunked LMR maintained by a friend (top notch stuff, analog FM but GPS synchronised network)

With the same signal, feedline, antenna and all, swapping between the RTL-SDR and the Airspy Mini, I have in average 5 SNR points less on the Mini !
And this is in Sensitive Gain mode with the cursor at 14 (sweet spot, the max before it start to be too much gain…)
In Linear mode with the cursor at the default of 12, I lose 11 SNR points compared to the RTL V3 !!!

Granted, the signal is much cleaner on the Airspy, no more aliasing and ghosts signal (they creep up a bit at 14 in Sensitive mode thought…)

As an RF professional, I prefer selectivity (and spectral purity) to sensitivity, and it’s always a dilemma and a trade-off, but loosing 11 SNR point with a “so-called” superior Airspy model, is just too much to be worth it !

And with the roll-off in SDR# at 6 MSPS you only have 4.5 (and not really 4.8) MHz of really clean and uniform bandwidth ! Better with 2 RTL-SDR to cover 4 MHz, or maybe just buy an RSP1A… (which I intend to test soon too to do some comparison)

just one clarification, I work in an ESD-safe lab, so it is not static electricity fault ! Either this design is bad, or they delivered me a defective model (purchased on ITEAD…)

Buyer Beware…

BTW, as a side note, the build quality of the RTL-SDR V3 and (especially) the dipole antenna, have declined, the finish seems more “rough/coarse” and several V3 from 2018-2019 were able to maintain a 0.75 ppm accuracy, the models I just bought last month seems to only maintain a 1.5 ppm accuracy…

The “Chrome” coating on the antennas peels off after a few days of use too…
Maybe it’s due to Covid, they can’t achieve the same “quality-control” as before… too bad but still cheap enough for “attritable” test componants…
On the plus side, DHL shipping is probably too expensive for the amateur tinkerer, but wow, 5 days to receive the stuff is amazing given the pandemic.

I’m curious to hear anybody feedback on this subject