Leif Continues his Comparisons of the Airspy HF+ Discovery, RSP1, Perseus and More SDRs

Leif (SM5BSZ) is fairly well known in the SDR community for doing very indepth technical tests of various SDR receivers over on his YouTube channel. Recently he's released part two of a series where he compares the new Airspy HF+ Discovery against various other SDRs such as the Perseus, SDRplay RSP1, Airpsy HF+ Dual, Airspy + SpyVerter and AFEDRI SDR-Net. In the first video he studied the blocking and second order intermodulation effects of each SDR using signal generators. We summarized those results in this previous post.

In the new video Leif compares the dynamic range of each SDR using real HF antenna signals at 7.2 MHz. In order to create a fair test of dynamic range, appropriate attenuation is added to each receiver in order to make their noise figures equivalent, so that the incoming signal strength is the same for each SDR.

The first set of dynamic range results is summarized at time 08:14, and these results show the dynamic range comparisons for strong night time signals. Again like in the other videos the Perseus is used as the reference SDR since it is always the best. The tests show that the HF+ Discovery trails behind the Perseus by only -3dB, followed by the HF+ Dual at -10dB, AFEDRI at -15dB, Airspy+SpyVerter at -18dB and finally the RSP1 at -23dB.

The second set of results is summarized at 17:47 and this includes a day time dynamic range test. The rankings are very similar to the night time test.

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OKCarl

How about a review of one of the Ettus brand USRP’s? Which one works best with SDR#?

piloteer

Don’t bother getting USRPs if all you want to do is listening to HF/VHF signals with SDR#. As the site admin mentioned, they are not designed for such tasks. They are worth the money if and only if you are doing academic researches (involving high-rate digital communication).

Yes, USRPs are often supported by HAM software, but that is because they were the first commercial SDR transceivers to hit the market.