Video Comparison Between E4000, R820T, FC0013 and Comparison with SDR# and Linrad

On YouTube sm5bsz has uploaded a video showing a comparison between the E4000, R820T and FC0013 tuners, and also comparing the receive performance of SDRSharp and Linrad. In the video Linrad showed superior receive performance with the E4000 when compared to SDRSharp due to some custom gain profiles which are enabled in Linrad only (but can also be enabled in SDRSharp with a plugin/mod).

Note that the reason Linrad showed better performance is purely due to the fact that he used a modified librtlsdr driver in Linrad which has the custom gain profiles. However, in a previous post we posted about a modification/plugin to SDRSharp which allows this modified librtlsdr to be used, which will allow SDRSharp to perform as well as Linrad for the E4000.

Linrad is another software defined radio program which is much more difficult to use, but was the first program to support the modified librtlsdr. Some people prefer Linrad due to it’s advanced GUI which has a lot of signal information on display.

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Youssef

“In the video Linrad showed superior performance when compared to SDRSharp.”
You’re completely wrong my friend. Leif is comparing his “Linearity mode” modification to Osmocom’s original librtlsdr. Osmocom refused to merge his work for reasons I can’t argue here. It would be fair to do the same test using the same libs.

Youssef

In fact, it’s not even a mod. It’s rather a new plugin. As you know SDR# has a modular architecture that allows anybody to add his own hardware by writing plugins. Kinetic Avionics did the same just a few days ago. “Zefie” has done that same job at some point and he choosed to use Leif’s version of librtlsdr. In all these cases, the core functionality of SDR# didn’t change and it’s not what’s being compared in that video.
Now the question I’m asking is, why using different softwares for comparing different versions of the lib? Wouldn’t it be more relevant to use either SDR# or Linrad in all the tests? Or even if we’re comparing the two softwares, wouldn’t be more relevant to use the same lib?