Trouble with GNU Radio and RTL-SDR on Windows

[bobasaurus]

I'm trying to get a basic setup of GNURadio working with the RTL-SDR on my Windows 7 x64 machine. I'm using the latest pre-built binary windows installer of GNURadio:

http://www.gcndevelopment.com/gnuradio/downloads.htm

The basic signal source/sink block examples are working fine. But I'm having trouble getting it to work with the RTL-SDR. Here is the simple flowgraph I tried making:



But running it just causes python to crash without much useful information:



Running the generated python script from the gnu radio command prompt has the same problem. Each time no useful error message is printed. If I click "debug" on the windows dialog, Visual Studio pops up with a little more information:



I have no idea what is causing this and would appreciate any input. The RTL-SDR is installed and plugged into the computer, working fine with all other SDR applications (SDR#, HDSDR, etc).

[bobasaurus]

I tried directly downloading the windows builds of the gr-osmosdr and rtl-sdr 0.5.3 blocks from here:

http://www.gcndevelopment.com/gnuradio/downloads.htm

And copied the dlls into the <gnu radio install>\bin folder, and the .lib files into the <gnu radio install>\lib folder. Now I'm getting an actual error message (same message with both the osmocom source and rtl-sdr source blocks):



The "No module named _osmosdr_swig" error is baffling. The _osmosdr_swig.pyd file exists on my machine at:

C:\Program Files\GNURadio-3.7\lib\site-packages\osmosdr

Any ideas?

[bobasaurus]

Solved the issue by reverting to an older version of GNU Radio.

Latest/broken version: v3.7.13.5/v1.6
Working older version: v3.7.11.1/v1.3

Hope this helps anyone else with the same issue.

[Mazilla]

Try to set 'Device argument' in 'RTL-SDR Source' to 'rtl=1'
It works in 3.7.13.4.

[gnoprime]

@Mazilla, You're a lifesaver! I created an account to just say that your suggestion works for 3.8.