Re: Releases v3.8.4.0 and v3.9.3.0

[Chris Vine]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2021 20:46:50 -0400
Glen Langston <glen.i.langston@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for all everyone's efforts.   
> 
> We hope to give them a try.
> 
> I’ve got a Soapy SDR question.   Does anyone have a SDRPlay RSP1A running
> with Gnuradio 3.8.  I’ve not been able to find a running example.
> 
> Please send a link, if you’ve got a good example.

I don't have a link to offer you as my gnuradio installation is home-
compiled from a number of scripts.  However, I did have my RSP1A
working fine with gnuradio-3.8.2.0 using the out-of-tree gr-soapy block.
I have now moved on to gnuradio-3.9.2.0, which has the advantage of
providing an in-tree soapy block as part of the gnuradio distribution.

If you are using gnuradio-3.8 and can't move to gnuradio-3.9, I found
that the out-of-tree gr-soapy block, wrapping SoapySDR and SoapySDRPlay,
worked far better than trying to use the gr-osmosdr block's unfree
backend for the RSP driver directly.  gr-osmosdr's soapy backend worked
OK with the RSP driver and is what you will need if you are using gqrx,
otherwise that adds an unnecessary level of indirection: instead of
using gr-osmosdr's soapy backend you might just as well use gr-soapy
directly, and the latter enables you to configure for example the
RSP1A's MF/AM and VHF/DAB filters, which I never managed to do with
gr-osmosdr.

SoapySDRPlay seemed to work fine with both the 2.13.1 and 3.05.1
versions of the RSP driver; since the RSP1A only has a single hardware
sampler there is no advantage in using the 3.05.1 driver so I stuck with
version 2.13.1, which avoids having to start a daemon.

My main issue was in working out which gr-osmosdr and gr-soapy
repository worked with which version of gnuradio.  With gnuradio-3.9's
in-tree soapy block that is now obviated.  If you need help with
versions/repositories for gnuradio-3.8 I should be able to help.

Hope that helps.