RX888 stick time...

[bagmouse7]

I finally received my RX-888 2 days ago.
I have many of the current SDRs on the market, but the 888 brings some interesting new capabilities given its extremely wide bandwidth receive.
First off, the physical build of the 888 seems very sold, inside, the board is very clean with no reworks that I can see. It looks great.
The top half is a big heat sink. I have run it for hours at the widest bandwidth and the case it just warm.
You will need to grab the Cypress USB3 drivers from Simon's site. These seem to be the latest drivers, they work for Windows 10 and 7.
On all my PCs the 888 was originally discovered as a "westbridge" USB device under device manager. You have to point windows to the correct cypress drivers.
USB3 ports are required (not optional) the 888 is discovered when connected to USB2 ports, but even at its lowest data rate it does not work correctly.
On my system the 888 was slightly unstable when connected to the front panel USB3 ports.
I was getting some randoms stops in SDR console and some hangs when I would make changes that required returning.
However, I moved the 888 to the USB3 ports in the back that are directly connected to the motherboard and it is now much more stable.
Almost no hangs and it has run continuously for hours.
I still need more stick time with it, but so far the receive seems on par with the NetSDR/AirspyHF/Perseus that I normally run.
There is just ALOT more spectrum!
Is seems to me that these wide bandwidth receivers (Elad S3 will be here soon) will drive some additional software features like multiple receivers/demodulators, child software instances and network shared I/Q sources.
Another interesting thing about the 888 is that it is an example of how fast the Chinese are able to go from a paper design to a prototype to production (cheaply).
So far I am impressed with the 888.... and, for $200 it seems like an incredible value!

[Max]

Hi. I would be very interested to know what you think of VHF/UHF performance?

73

Max