RTL-SDR Blog v4 dongle support

[adampbeardsley]

The new RTL-SDR.com blog dongle is out, but they have not pushed the drivers to osmosdr yet. I'm going to try and get it working, and document my progress here.

[EphemeralDisco]

Instructions for v4 driver installation are here: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/v4/

For *nix: The first set of instructions for Linux (Debian) did not work for me. The second set of instructions using packages did work. Copied below: Update RTL-SDR driver to v4: sudo apt update sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev git cmake sudo apt install debhelper

git clone https://github.com/rtlsdrblog/rtl-sdr-blog cd rtl-sdr-blog sudo dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign cd ..

sudo dpkg -i librtlsdr0*.deb sudo dpkg -i librtlsdr-dev.deb sudo dpkg -i rtl-sdr_.deb

[adampbeardsley]

I was able to get it to work using the first set of instructions on https://www.rtl-sdr.com/v4/

I tested things using a simple gnu radio companion flowgraph:

Here was my test data using v3 dongle, tuned to a local radio station (seen very weakly at 89.5 MHz), plus the RF explorer transmitting at 89.7 MHz (unsure why it's showing up at 89.6 MHz).

Before installing the new driver, the flowgraph happily ran using the v4 dongle, but produced no signal: (note I forgot to set the "Display RF Frequencies" button, but it's tuned the same as the first dataset.)

After going through the instructions on rtl-sdr.com/v4, and relaunching GRC, I got a missing block error. I reran this line: sudo apt install gnuradio-dev gr-osmosdr librtlsdr-dev

And now everything seems to work. New data test:

And to be sure, I ran the chart data collection with the RF explorer transmitting at 1419.7 MHz: The bias-T was successfully enabled, and we get a nice bright line at the correct frequency. This was done in the lab, so there's a ton of other cruff, unsurprisingly.