The RTL-SDR and the Pinebook Pro

[diodelass]

Since there is discussion of including an RTL-SDR module option in the PineTab, I've had some renewed excitement over the possibilities of doing SDR stuff on Pine devices. However, I still can't seem to get my RTL-SDR dongle to work on my Pinebook Pro. It works fine on my other computers, and I have little reason to believe that it's not receiving enough power, but even so, all I can ever get it to do is produce what appears to be a repeating loop of the first few samples it collects whenever I try to use it.

Is this a fluke that's down to some issue with my specific units (either the SDR or the Pinebook Pro), or have others had this problem as well? I'm doing my best to debug it, but the answer is still eluding me.

How about you? Have you tried using an RTL-SDR on the Pinebook Pro (or the regular Pinebook, for that matter)? How'd it go?

[diodelass]

My USB power meter came today, and I believe I can confirm that it's not a power issue. The device draws less than 200 mA when operating in central UHF, and there's no measurable voltage droop.
I'll see if I can try building the driver from source, in case something's wrong with the one that Manjaro currently ships.

[diodelass]

I feel silly now: I tried building the rtl-sdr driver from source (using the AUR package) and it just worked right off the bat without a hitch. It's actually running better and dropping fewer samples than it does on my Thinkpad.

All I wonder now: what happened on the Manjaro ARM end of things to make it break so thoroughly in the binary release?

Anyway, if you happen to be running up against the same issue here (the RTL-SDR emitting a short loop of junk samples instead of real signals when run on the Pinebook Pro under Manjaro), try building the rtl-sdr-git package from the AUR. Given the silence in this thread, this isn't a particularly common issue, but I hope what I found eventually helps someone else.

Guess I should submit a bug report to the Manjaro maintainer?

[tllim]

I feel silly now: I tried building the rtl-sdr driver from source (using the AUR package) and it just worked right off the bat without a hitch. It's actually running better and dropping fewer samples than it does on my Thinkpad.

All I wonder now: what happened on the Manjaro ARM end of things to make it break so thoroughly in the binary release?

Anyway, if you happen to be running up against the same issue here (the RTL-SDR emitting a short loop of junk samples instead of real signals when run on the Pinebook Pro under Manjaro), try building the rtl-sdr-git package from the AUR. Given the silence in this thread, this isn't a particularly common issue, but I hope what I found eventually helps someone else.

Guess I should submit a bug report to the Manjaro maintainer?

Glad to know your RTL-SDR works now :-)

[pfeerick]

I feel silly now: I tried building the rtl-sdr driver from source (using the AUR package) and it just worked right off the bat without a hitch. It's actually running better and dropping fewer samples than it does on my Thinkpad.

Don't feel silly... I'm grateful you've debugged the issue so I won't have it when I try SDR on mine soon!