开云体育

Has anyone managed to get the Softrock Ensemble II to work on a Raspberry Pi ?

If so, please can you guide me to which software to use and how to set it up.

Mine used to work on Windows 7, but I can no longer get it to work properly.
There is always a double hump of some big noise in the centre of any spectrum display too.
I can no longer get any software to tune a software receiver, like GQRX or Quisk.

I would love to get this working again and on a R Pi. ANy help appreciated.

Try here.



I've been trying to? do? the same with a Pi and a? softrock 6.1.
Not fully suceeded? yet as? I have a problem on transmit.
More? info? here.



Don m5aky

Bob

Has anyone managed to get the Softrock Ensemble II to work on a Raspberry Pi ?

No but

There is always a double hump of some big noise in the centre of any spectrum display too.

Which could well be due to ground loops, might be present on any platform. /g/softrock40/message/82427

Your YouTube QRM, no idea but I see similar and assume it is from some noisy electronic device. It's not often in my way and when it is not strong.

73 Alan G4ZFQ

Time for me to open my mouth and insert foot.
Before tackling a raspberry pi, which should be simple, for me anyway, find out why it does not work on WIndoze.? I just plugged mine into win10 for the first time in well over a year and it does show up as a "libusb-win32 devices" as a softrock bla bla bla in device manager.

<lecture on>.? Upgrade windows 7 to 10.? It is still free.? If you wish to not go that route then open Device Manager on your win7 box and plug in/out your usb for soft rock.? Does it show up?? <\lecture off>
<lecture me on>? No I have not plugged mine into a rpi yet.? Been busy with rpitx, hackrf and gnuradio on rpi.? Just upgrade to General so that will happen soon.? <\lecture me off?
Bring on the whips fellow softrockers.? :(

Many thanks for your replies and interest.
Yes it configures correctly on windows, and I can not get any software to make it work properly.
W 10 does not work at all, and windows 7 on laptop is the one I want to use, it worked before on there.
Not willing to upgrade the laptop to W10 as it holds all my old amateur radio programs.

The double hump on the spectrum display is there even without aerial connected.
I will look into all this tomorrow and run down all the options in the link from Alan,
when I have more time and post my results.

Bob
Although I didn't? get the transmit working properly on the Raspberry Pi I used the same setup? and procedure on a laptop with a Startech usb soundcard? and Linux? Mint and that appeared to? be successful. I do get? an annoying peak in the centre of? the display with Quisk, I'm not sure if it can be eliminated.
I'll have to? set it up? again and check it out.
Don m5aky

After several trials, I had to use USBSoftrock command to check configuration of USB on my Raspberry Pi 3B.
I use a really cheap USB audio dongle to get the rx into the Pi.
That all working I re-installed Quisk which is wonderfully difficult to get working, but managed to make it work.
Biggest problem was making the audio work, and soon as I selected 'Pulse' I started to get the waterfall to display.
So now my Ensemble II is working on a Raspberry PI. I still have a spike at the centre of the screen, and it looks like it
always shows a reflexion of one half of the waterfall in the other half like the spike in the middle is a mirror. Maybe that is a problem between Quisk and
the latest versions of Python as I believe it was written for Python2.

So much progress made and shows it can work on a Raspberry PI3B.

These symptoms points that you have no getting two channels (stereo) from your cheap audio dongle. A lot of these are mono and the Softrock need the two channels to do the math correctly. I have 2 apparently identical USB audio dongles and only one is stereo, the mono one was the cheaper.

When you select one of this audio dongles check that the Mic/line input is specified as stereo.

The spike that you see in the center is caused by noise near the 0 freq (DC), only good quality audio cards can minimize this spike.

Regards,

Ignacio EB4APL

--
El software de antivirus Avast ha analizado este correo electrónico en busca de virus.

Thanks Ignacio, those are very interesting points. I am going to try with a better audio dongle.
Not sure I will put much more effort into testing after that, as I have to devote time to other things.

FWIW, I also tested many cheap chinese $2 eBay sound "dongles" and many of them only had a mono single channel audio input (you need stereo input for IQ SDRs like the softrock).

The cheapest USB sound card that I eventually settled on with stereo Line input, was this one:




keywords "usb sound card 5.1"

It works fine, but it maxes out at 48kHz. It seems to have a slight audio IQ balance problem when switching between bands, though that could be something else I haven't pinned down yet. TBH the balance problem is probably me being nit picking perfectionist. I haven't checked but I'm guessing any transmit harmonics are low enough to be snuffed out by the output filter.