So I've had the USRP2 for a while now, I haven't gotten around to reporting on my first few weeks with it here, so here goes:
I got a pretty nice unit, in the original box, which I didn't expect, with it being a used ebay item. So that's neat.
It took a bit of messing around to get it functional with the latest uhd software suite, among other things, it needed
a firmware update. Thankfully the firmware update wasn't too big of a pain. You simple write the new firmware onto the
sd card that goes in the front slot, uhd comes with an utility to do so. It literally takes seconds. (it's not a lot of data)
After recompiling my entire gnuradio stack for the umpteenth time, I got uhd support compiled into it and the rest of the
ecosystem, including osmosdr, which a lot of things depend on, including iridium-toolkit, and op25, among other things.
I managed to get it working with gqrx and multimon - i am still running into some issues with iridium-toolkit and op25.
The extra bandwidth is a very dramatic improvement over the regular rtl-sdr.com dongles and the airspy. While I can't
quite get the full 50MHz in gqrx, I can get about 30 before things start slowing down. CPU usage starts going way up
at high sample rates.
The snr is dramatically better of course than a regular rtl-sdr.com dongle - although the airspy's is quite good too.
It does suffer quite as bad from the overloading issues the airspy has - which is nice.
I look forward to doing more experimentation with this thing! I haven't had a ton of extra free time between work
and domestic duties... I don't know where people get all this extra time from during the lockdown, I wish I could
get me some. :) - So many unfinished side-projects waiting for me to get to!
