ADS-B Decoder for the SDRplay RSP Now Available
A new ADS-B decoder for the SDRplay RSP has recently been released by the SDRplay programmers. The SDRplay is a $149 USD software defined radio with a 0.1 – 2000 MHz range, 12-bit ADC and up to 8 MHz of bandwidth. In a previous review we compared it against the Airspy and HackRF.
The SDRplay team have based their new decoder on the multi-platform compatible dump1090 code, which is an ADS-B decoder that was originally written for the RTL-SDR. The Windows version can be be downloaded from http://www.sdrplay.com/windows.html, and the code for other platforms can be downloaded from https://github.com/SDRplay.
To help with the installation procedure the SDRplay has also provided a manual (pdf) which shows exactly how to download and set up the required ADS-B software on a Windows system. They also write that the software is fairly new and is still being optimized for best performance.
In the future after the software is further optimized we hope to compare the RSP against the RTL-SDR and Airspy on ADS-B reception.
We now have an updated beta version of ADS-B for Windows. This is based upon the 16bit Mutability version of dump1090 developed by Oliver Jowett and unlocks the full 12 bit performance of the RSP1. People should see a significant performance improvement over the dump1090_sdrplus version, which was based upon 8 bit code. Go to http://www.sdrplay.com/windows.html – as with the recent update on Raspberry Pi, it supports both 2MHz and 8MHz demodulator modes. We recommend you uninstall the previous version (if you had it) before installing this one. Performance should be better than before. This is still in beta so any feedback or comments to [email protected] is welcomed.