Testing Keenerds RTL-SDR Drivers

Keenerd (aka Kyle Keen) recently ran a fundraiser to support him to work on improving the RTL-SDR driver and related software. A few months ago he released an update to the driver which made some improvements including some tweaks by another programmer teejeez that optimized the R820T’s filters which may help with out of band aliasing. The list of issues he is working on and has completed can be found at http://igg.kmkeen.com/.

To use keenerds drivers on Windows with SDR# you can go to http://igg.kmkeen.com/builds/, and download the latest build zip file. Then simply copy all the non .exe files into the SDR# folder and rename librtlsdr.dll to rtlsdr.dll. We recently tested the new drivers and show screenshots of the difference below. Nearby to the marine weather report frequency used in the screenshots is a very strong pager signal which causes significant interference. With the gain turned up on the original drivers the entire band is wiped out when the pager signal is transmitting. With keenerds drivers most of the band is usable and the weather signals can be heard. There do seem to be some issue with what looks like WFM interference appearing now however. Testing at other frequencies with nearby strong signals also seem to show that aliasing is significantly reduced. We also noticed a lower noise floor at some frequencies resulting in about a 2-3 dB better signal. However, we also noticed that the noise floor was raised slightly at some other frequencies. We suggest you give keenerds drivers a try and comment with any improvements or issues you see.