In the May 2015 issue of The Spectrum Monitor magazine, the SDRPlay was reviewed in an article by Thomas. Now the article has been released for free over on the swling.com blog. The SDRPlay is a $149 USD software defined radio with a tuning range of 100 kHz – 380 MHz and 430 MHz – 2 GHz, a 12-bit ADC, and up to 8 MHz of bandwidth. We consider it as a decent upgrade to those wishing for something better than the RTL-SDR and a good competitor to the Airspy SDR.

In the review Thomas unboxes the unit, installs the software and reviews the HF DX performance comparing it to the more expensive Elad-FDM S2. While the performance isn’t as good as the Elad, Thomas writes that for the price it performs very impressively. In his conclusion he writes:

[The] SDRplay RSP really impressed me from the beginning with its low noise floor, variable IF bandwidth options, and relative ease of installation. Since the RSP only requires one USB cable for both data and power, it’s also an ideal portable SDR.

Update: Note that we also now have our own comprehensive review available here which compares the Airspy, SDRplay RSP and HackRF.

The Radio Spectrum Processor (RSP) by SDRplay is a receive only software defined radio with a 100 kHz to 2 GHz range (with a small gap at 380 MHz to 430 MHz), a 12-bit analogue to digital converter (ADC) (~10.4 ENOB), 8 MHz bandwidth and a bank of several switched front end filters. It currently costs $299 USD and with these specs and price range we consider the RSP to be a competitor to the Airpsy and Funcube Dongle software defined radio offerings.

Recently several reviews of the SDRplay RSP have been written online and in magazines. The first review comes from the pages of the UK based Radio User magazine (pdf warning) which goes through the specs, design, install and operation of the device. A more recent review shows an unboxing and there’s also this review submitted to the SDRplay team which demonstrates some FM dxing results. There are also several more reviews collected by the SDRplay team linked on the SDRplay website at http://www.sdrplay.com/reviews.htm.

We also note that we recently posted about some in depth measurements that Leif (programmer of Linrad) recently made to multiple SDR’s, including the SDRplay.