FiFi SDR Discussion

[N2DTS]

I ordered one, yet another sdr to my collection.
All the ones I have had work great, and its more about the software then the actual radio.

Its kind of nice having a bunch of programs work with one radio, its like having a bunch of different radios for the price of one.

For AM operation, I do not really notice much difference between the qs1r, the sdr-iq, the flex stuff, or the peaberry V2.
They are all much better then any boat anchor receiver, and it comes down to the software you like.

[W2VW]

Nice review Rob.

[W7NGA]

My wife Debbie read Rob's posting and is concerned by the 'TOY' association, even though oblique.

I was so careful in defending my FiFi $169 purchase early on, taking note that it is:

A state-of-the-art computer controlled receiver - required for all my amateur radio operations
A highly-calibrated frequency standard and measurement instrument - required for all my amateur radio operations
An emergency receiver for power outages - required for all my amateur radio operations
A SDR experimental development board for studying DSP algorithms and programming - required for all my amateur radio operations

A financial investment as SDR receivers will surely escalate in value

Toy? not in my shack!

I suspect after 32 years of marriage she was on to me from the get-go

bless her heart ...

dan W7NGA

[W1AEX]

Your wife and my wife must have gone to the same "husband auditing" classes Dan. Make sure she re-reads it and notes that it is NOT a toy! Looks like you are more than capable of defending yourself in all these manly departments but just make sure your wife never looks at your QRZ page with all those beautiful toys, errrrr... I mean precision electronic measurement devices.

73,

Rob W1AEX

[N2DTS]

Mine came in the mail today, and I got it built in about 10 minutes.
Mine seems loaded with birdies and other odd signals.

[W7NGA]

an inauspicious beginning ... please keep us SDR newbies apprised.

dan W7NGA

[W1AEX]

Mine came in the mail today, and I got it built in about 10 minutes.
Mine seems loaded with birdies and other odd signals.

That's strange Brett. I don't really see that (from the bottom of the AM BCB to 20 meters) when connected to either of the 85 foot wire loops. I do see symptoms of overload from the local AM BCB station when I connect it directly to my Hex Beam and tune 20 - 10 meters, but running it through an old FRT-7700 receiver tuner (simple t-match) cures that. I have not tried the FiFi with my open-wire fed 160-75-60-40 meter 180 foot center-fed, but my guess is that it would probably not like it without being behind the antenna tuner. I'd be curious what you are using as an antenna and also if you have any BCB stations in close proximity.

I did find that some SDR programs handled things better than others when used with the FiFi. SDR-Console V2.1 is the the best all-around performer, but Radio Jet also does a very decent job and is very usable on all bands. My FiFi does not seem to like the AM detector in HDSDR. It sounds like crap unless I tune slightly off frequency or receive with either LSB or USB. No issue with that when running Radio Jet or SDR-Console. SDR Sharp is usable but the AM detector is kind of unpleasant and it's a little primitive. I still have not gotten mine to work with any version of PowerSDR including PSDR-SR40 so I still have some investigating to do in that area.

The USB cable that I am using is one that was left over from an old digital camera. It's definitely not optimal but it does have a small choke on the radio end which is better than nothing. One thing that has been reported is that if you see lots of birdies or other anomalies it's possible that your USB cable is not well shielded and may not have adequate de-coupling so crud from the USB bus of the computer enters the receiver. Just a thought.

Rob W1AEX

[N2DTS]

Yes, I will have to do some more tests.
I was using hdsdr I think, into the shack computer which is clean, my laptop can gennerate some crud from the power supply on some sdr's, but I did not try the fifi on that yet.

The fifi kind of hosed up my hdsdr for the Peaberry though, these programs go in and change things and don't change them back for another radio it seems.

Things were driving me nuts, the peaberry would not change frequency, it LOOKED like it was changing, but it was not really talking to the si570 so I heard 3873 on every band and frequency!


I love the small size of the fifi, its less then 1/2 the size of the sdr-iq.

Maybe the program was not working the band pass filter board or something, as I had strong signals on all bands that were not really there, the CB band was loaded with signals, not real, some were there with the antenna hooded up, some not.

The fifi clock is also way off, unlike the peaberry and sdr-iq, but I suppose that can be corrected in software.
I did not try that since I did not want to hose up my other radios, and I am not sure the programs remember what radio is what...

Some radios (and software) work well with others, the sdr-iq and the Peaberry get along fine with hdsdr and sdr-radio, I can switch back and forth without any issues, the fifi is newer maybe and not supported as well.

I think I will experiment with the fifi on the lap top so I do not hose up the shack computer...

One thing I noticed, under the audio mixer section in windows, you can adjust the audio level which seems to act like an rf gain control, you are adjusting the audio level of the on board sound card chip in the fifi....




 

[N2DTS]

Also, you can change that ugly bar graph meter to an analog one if you want:
http://n2dts.smugmug.com/Ham-radio#!/i-cbWWbLN/A

You must have a newer version of sdr-radio then I do....looks different...

[W1AEX]

You must have a newer version of sdr-radio then I do....looks different...

Yeah, I moved away from the SDR-Radio 1.5 version to the SDR-Console 2.1 version. The 2.x versions are very impressive in the performance department and the GUI offers a lot of user flexibility in its appearance and layout options. I've noticed the panadapter in SDR-Console indicates very few anamolies when compared to what is seen in the Radio Jet wide view panadapter. Two powerful AM broadcast stations that are within 12 miles of my location will show up on my Flex 5000 at several places on the band unless I insert an attenuator pad or run a tuned pre-selector. To my amazement, the FiFi seems to be more resistant to this than my Flex is.

The two pictures below of the FiFi receiving WCBS 880 indicate that the way Simon Brown has implemented the AGC function in SDR-Console results in a much cleaner running FiFi than when Radio Jet is used. For one thing, there is far less "warping" of the baseline with SDR-Console (pictured with a black background). Also, everything in the Console panadapter is where it should be, no anomalies are present. In the Radio Jet panadapter, note that the weak station at 870 is sitting at 868 for some inexplicable reason. I also don't like the way Radio Jet's vertical grid lines don't line up with the 10 kc steps in the panadapter, but that's a different story.

I found when selecting the input device for all my software that FiFi has two entries:

Complex Baseband I/Q [FiFi SDR]
FiFi SDR DSP

The correct one to select is the Complex Baseband I/Q device, although they both seem to work. I found when using the FiFi SDR DSP entry that some software would not allow me to adjust the sampling rate from 48>96>192 within their GUI interface. Also, the wide panadapter view may display a truncated or compressed view as if the signals are picked off from behind whatever filter is selected in the GUI. I'm not sure what other little anomalies might also be present if the I/Q stream is not selected but it appears that one entry is pre-processed (Complex Baseband I/Q) and the other is post-processed (FiFi SDR DSP) and the software is looking for the pre-processed entry.  

I used the automatic calibration routine in the rockprog command line utility to correct a slight frequency variation that was evident when tuning the upper bands. It improved things from an error of about 1kc to within about 30 cycles on 10 meters which is as good as my 590S slopbucket rig. When you use rockprog, there is a provided batch file that gives you a menu with options to run several routines including the automatic clock calibration:

# Automatic quartz calibration!
rockprog -w --autotune

http://o28.sischa.net/fifisdr/trac/wiki/rockprog

I played around with HDSDR last night and found that my reception issue on AM was a result of setting the LO too close to the tuned frequency. Once I moved it 10 kc away it was all good. I still don't like it as much as SDR-Console though as I've gotten used to being able to make custom receive filters and setting up frequency "favorites" that allow me to jump from band-to-band and mode-to-mode and receive filter-to-filter with a single button push.

I found after using an older version of PowerSDR (2.2.2) with the FiFi that my Flex 5K went through its FFT calibration routine the next time I fired up version 2.7.2 to use it. The ancient versions of PSDR that I ran must have overwritten the wisdom file or something. No big deal but I can see where your PeaBerry might also freak out after FiFi "shared" HDSDR and probably dumped its own preferences into whatever cfg file is used.

At any rate, I find myself using the Fifi as a background receiver when I'm working on something at the bench. It also serves as a decent frequency/spectrum/audio monitor when I'm running my Viking rig. I just let it run with a few feet of RG-6 coax connected and it gets plenty of signal that way without any overloading issues. At a glance, I can see how far the Viking has drifted off frequency, how wide my signal is, and I can hear if the audio is adjusted as it should be. I will probably end up hanging it off the IF of a few different receivers here at some point, but the novelty of using it as a stand-alone receiver will probably not wear off for quite awhile.

Rob W1AEX

          

[N2DTS]

I have been having very bad results with this thing.
Got it working with the radio jet software, seemed to work ok in a very basic way.

With sdr-radio, I get a bunch of overloaded garbage.

I went to download sdr-radio version 2.0 and they want to push all sorts of trick bogus software onto my computer so I aborted that.

[W1AEX]

Are you sure you were getting SDR Console from Simon's development site? It's clean and a simple download from this page:

http://v2.sdr-radio.com/Download.aspx

Not sure about all the overload problems in version 1.5 but as you can see from the vids I made there is no issue at all with version 2.1 of SDR Console. Then again, I'm not sure what antenna you are using or what signals might be in your local area that could be problematic. If there is no improvement with version 2.1 it would probably be worth opening a trouble ticket with them. You can also browse other trouble tickets to see if anyone else ran into this.

http://o28.sischa.net/fifisdr/trac/newticket

They also have a troubleshooting page here, although the only real issue with sensitivity reported was lack of it due to the protection diode strapped across the antenna terminal having shorted out:

http://o28.sischa.net/fifisdr/trac/wiki/Reparaturanleitung

Good luck!

[N2DTS]

Thanks for the link to version 2.0.
I down loaded it, do not like it (its very confusing) and the radio seems to do the same thing, a big blob of signal in the center, very distorted audio.

I think I will just list it for sale...