Old Versions Of SDRSharp Are Better

I remember writing a post a few years back titled "SDR# Plugins Seem Outdated". Well, after a long break from SDR I decided to dust off the old RTL dongle and give it another go. I'd had a spark of enthusiasm relating to decoding DMR [digital] on SDR and wanted to see it I could get it to work. Well, I did manage to do that. But did end up losing faith again in SDRSharp during the process. Don't get me wrong, it's great software. And out of all the software I've been testing, SDR# has the best sound output quality overall. But when it comes to plugins and version compatibility, SDR# is very poor.

SDR# v1727 Interface working with my old dongle

Not sure what they have done to the newer versions of SDRSharp, but they certainly don't work as well as the older versions. Especially in terms of plugin compatibility. It's like they [Airspy] have kind of abandoned the project or something. I'm not sure. Maybe they just lost interest in keeping it fully updated and moved on to other projects.

Anyway, it has been a little bit annoying trying to find a version of SDR# that is still compatible with the majority of good plugins. However, after some searching and messing around, I have found a version that seems to be very stable and compatible with my setup. Working really well with my retro setup.

That is version v1727 [1.0.0.1727]. If you want to give it a try yourself, you can find / download that version and many other older / newer versions and plugins here: https://www.iz3mez.it/software/SDRSharp/

The simple DMR decoder plugin isn't on that websites list of goodies, but it can still be found here: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/sdrsharp-plugins/ And I can confirm it works fine on my system [Windows 10 / 64bit]. Decoding clear DMR well.

I couldn't get the Tetra plugin to work though. The only one I could find was for x86 systems. There wasn't a 64-bit version available that I could find. I did still add the Tetra x86 plugin to SDR# but it had errors and crashed the software, so I removed it. I might try and apply a fix and reinstall it over the next week or two. Hopefully I can get it working.

Other software worth mentioning. Openear is very basic but really good. Not the best on Narrow FM, but definitely one of the best I have tested so far overall. It has everything already built-in, so no plugins to try and find. I will be using it more going forward for sure.