Windows 10: Software Defined Radios SDR and Windows 11 and beyond.....

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DLL file for SDR now inactive since Windows 10 update

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SDR radio-astronomy

Hello all

In windows-7 we use 2 programs to do research in schools for radioastronomy and we use the radio RTL820 Dongel.

RTL820 dongel The programs are SDR-sharp SDR Sharp and CFRAD2
CFRAD2 (cfrad2.zip).

First we install SDR-sharp. With Zadig.exe Zadig we install the "WinUSB (v6.1.7600.16385) driver". Then we run SDR-sharp and that is running fine. with sdr-sharp running we have to kill
sdr-sharp with taskmanager/end program. Now sdr-sharp shuts down but its keeping sending his data to the usb port. After this we start CFRAD2 end this program reads the data from the usb port.This works fine under win-7 but under win-10 we cant get it make
to work.

Has somebody some ideas how to fix this?

Greetings Henk

Instructions CFRAD

CFRAD2

For those who want to try Radio Astronomy with a RTL dongle on a windows machine; here is a method to do so.

This program captures and calculates FFT and add them in a file (100000 spectra avaraged in 5 minutes)

The program RTLsharp# is used for the settings.

This program was compiled on a w7 machine but under win-10 we cant make it to work

1. You need CFRAD2 unzipped to a folder and copy the libusb-1.0.dll to the systems32 folder.

If you have a 64bits machine, copy libusb-1.0.dll to the syswow64 folder. (thank you Damien)

2. Start your sharp# program, select your RTL usb dongle and select play.

3. you can select the frequency, any sample rate, (agc) gain settings and frequency correction; further settings have no influence on CFRAD2.

4. bring up the task manager by pressing ctrl alt delete.

5. go to the window processes.

6. right click SDRsharp.exe and click end process, and again end process

7. go to your cfrad2 folder and start cfrad2.exe

8. immediately a raw file is written; you can open it with an editor and check the first two values

these values are the highest and lowest value the program received from the dongle.

minimum is 0 and maximum is 255. The middle value is 127. Best is, to use the whole range of the

a/d converter; so a range of 5 to 250 is preferred.

9. Every 5 minutes a new spectrum file is written to the folder, until 288 files are written; 24H.

10. you can stop execution any time using the task manager.

Test Results

A quad core 1.8GHz machine was used with W7 os.

Sample rate number of obtained spectra efficiency

MS/s in 5 minutes

3.2 100645 0.2

2.048 100500 0.34

1.048 96057 0.63

0.25 36620 1

calculation method.

For each spectrum 2048 samples I and 2048 samples Q are used.

These samples are obtained in pairs at thesame moment.

In the ideal case, when sampling with 1.048MS/s, a total of 1048000/2048= 512 spectra/s should be produced.

However we obtain only 96057 spectra in 5 minutes = 320 spectra/s

So the efficiency of our capture and fft program is 320/512 = 0.63 for this sample rate.

What if you get an error message

1-error: no backend available.

reason; libusb-1.0.dll was not copied to the window system32 folder.

2-error: operation timed out.

reason; Sharp# was not started.

3-error: access denied.

reason; Sharp# was started but not killed.

4-error: operation timed out.

reason; Sharp# was started, but killed in the task application manager instead of the processes section.

5-error; ValueError: No backend available.

reason; the windows version dependant msvcr100.dll ( or msvcr90.dll) was not available in the cfrad start-up directory.

6-error; TypeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__getitem__'.

reason; bad usb connection.