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AlexandreRouma / SDRPlusPlus

Cross-Platform SDR Software
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Switch to latest Osmocomm driver on Windows for out-of-the-box RTL-SDRblog V4 support #1388

Open lutusp opened 5 months ago

lutusp commented 5 months ago

The relatively new RTL-SDR V4 dongle works very well with SDR++, but only after some reconfigurations that shouldn't be necessary. In particular, on Windows -- where most SDR++ users live -- it's necessary to replace an outdated DLL with a current one that supports the most recent RTL-SDR dongle.

The current DLL that RTL-SDR V4 needs is located here: https://github.com/rtlsdrblog/rtl-sdr-blog/releases/download/1.3.5/Release.zip The date on the current DLL is March 27, 2024.

The corresponding DLL bundled with SDR++ has a date of January 4, 2020 and won't work with the newer RTL-SDR versions.

I was planning to write an install/use article about SDR++ and the RTL-SDR V4, but to avoid burdening my readers with too much detail, I decided to test Windows first -- after all, that's the most common platform. But even on Windows, SDR++ won't detect or use the RTL-SDR V4 device without some DLL swapping.

Please consider bundling the current RTL-SDR DLL with your Windows release package, which BTW has a date of yesterday.

Yours is a first-rate application. Thanks for reading!

AlexandreRouma commented 5 months ago

No, it's not as simple as using the rtlsdrblog version.

That fork has a hack meant for SDR# that breaks Bias-T control. This has been discussed with RTL-SDRblog themselves. Switching to it would break the bias-t for everyone, including V4 users.

The real solution, and what has been worked on for a while, is compiling the upstream Osmocom librtlsdr for windows which has V4 support but not the SDR# hack, but I don't have time for that stuff currently.

lutusp commented 5 months ago

I should have known it wasn't as simple as I had imagined. Thanks for setting me straight. Closing this issue.

AlexandreRouma commented 4 months ago

I'll set this as a feature request for switching to the recent osmocomm drivers.