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rtlsdrblog / rtl-sdr-blog

Modified Osmocom drivers with enhancements for RTL-SDR Blog V3 and V4 units.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Feature Request - A Virtual RTL-SDR Device #37

Open ChrisDev8 opened 11 months ago

ChrisDev8 commented 11 months ago

Virtual RTL-SDR Device

A virtual driver for two RTL-SDR devices that double the bandwidth of just one RTL-SDR.

Implementation

When you plug in two RTL-SDR dongles, you can pass -c num of devices to chain to rtl_eeprom. This will double or triple the amount of usable bandwidth by using multiple RTL-SDR devices. And it creates a virtual driver that you can use in SDR++ or SDR#. The only difference is that the virtual RTL-SDR has double or triple the bandwidth.

Why

Most software defined radio application don't support using multiple sdr devices to double or triple the amount of usable bandwidth. With three RTL-SDR dongles, I could receive ATSC 3.0 with my antenna, but again most software defined radios don't support this.

Update

And I just realized most software for receiving signals such as ATSC 3.0 or LTE 4G don't support RTL-SDR devices at all. To fix this, it could fake a HackRF driver or UHD driver.

rtlsdrblog commented 9 months ago

It's not that easy if you want to decode signals combined across a boundary. First the two devices need to share the same LO crystal, so a hardware mod is required. Second some sample alignment with a noise source would be required to align samples. Third some sort of amplitude calibration would need to be done too.

KrakenSDR could potentially support this.