SDR Console, Beta Nov 1st 2025

Simon Brown • November 1, 2025

November 1st, 2025


Analyser

  • Analyser tag window change, as suggested by Jim.
  • Analyser tags now saved and restored correctly.
  • Analyser font size now supports small, medium and large.
  • Analyser loads saved projects faster.
  • Saving project now much faster and uses less memory.
  • More display lines available if you have enough RAM:
  • Less than 16GB then 50,000 lines.
  • 16GB to 32GB then 100,000 lines.
  • 32GB or more then 250,000 lines.
  • Fixed minor font issue with definition window.
  • Fixed issue scrolling when more than 32768 lines in display.


Data File Playback

  • Selecting a playback folder now creates the list of files much faster.


Emulation

Added a diagnostic check for the use of emulators. This code only works on W10 and above, so I dynamically load IsWow64Process2 from kernel32 which avoids issues on older versions of Windows.


In the logfile you see something like this:


05:23:48.185: Vendor ....: GenuineIntel

05:23:48.185: Brand .....: Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 265K

05:23:48.185: -

05:23:48.185: x86 Emulation:

05:23:48.185: Process .......: 0x0000, "Not emulated"

05:23:48.185: Architecture ..: 0x8664, "AMD64"

05:23:48.185: -


Favourites

  • Updated the default 60m bandwidth.
  • Changed Broadcast :: VHF CCIR title to Band II.
  • Groups now have user-selectable files.
  • Default definitions renames to main.
  • Changed the ribbon bar, Selection entry to Options (see image below). The dropdown options have been replaced with a single window, allowing more room for text.


Locked Receivers

  • If the program is stopped or a favourite created when a receiver is locked, this caused problems with the receiver being locked but no indication. With this kit receiver lock state is not applied in a favourite definition.


Logfile

  • Automatically save the logfile when closing, really added so I can check program responding correctly to Shutdown and Restart.
  • Old logfiles are purged after the program has been running for one minute.


Logging

  • Added logbook FA option as below, FA is the command to read/write RX1.


Narrow FM

  • Added 150Hz CTCSS squelch tone.
  • De-emphasis is now optional, selected from: Ribbon bar, Receive, Mode..., Narrow FM.


Persistent Display

  • Got a crash inside the persistent display logic, my sanity checks weren't good enough so have improved this.


Remote Server

  • After connecting to a remote server, the input fields can now be edited to change connection parameters.


Ribbon Bar

  • View panel tidied up.


Signal Meter (SMeter)

  • Added more presets for the Signal meter, Ribbon bar, View, Spectrum, Signal Meter.


Spectran ECO

  • Changed SPECTRAN path order to pick up DLLs from the SDK folder rather than the main folder.


Status Bar

  • GPU, Audio entries on status bar now optional, selected from Program Options, Performance, CPU Memory.


System Shutdown / Restart

  • If SDR Console is running when the system shuts down or restarts then SDR Console closes gracefully. What happens - five seconds after SDR Console receives the SHUTDOWN message a timer calls the OnClose() processing, so you have five seconds to about the shutdown / restart.


Text Size

  • Fonts now scale correctly when a non-default Accessibility > Text Size is selected (see image).

Previous Kits...

I'm now back to 90% SDR Console support, so here's the first beta for at least eight months. Scroll to the bottom for a link to the beta kit.

  • The source is fully archived, so crash dumps can be analysed.


September 4th, 2025

  • Added Simple-Radio-Control-Protocol (SRCP) as per JB's Dx Info and tested only with StationList. SRCP specifies a method to control a radio and get its status back to StationList (or a similiar application). To avoid any headache on user and software writer a very simple method was chosen. Communication is done by sending UDP string messages.
  • If there are other logging programs which support SRCP please let me know.
  • I have not added support for RDS, only frequency changes.
  • After the first message is sent from StationList the protocol is activated.
  • This should be documented somewhere in the Settings somewhere, but where?
  • What's missing?


August 30th, 2025

  • If the RDS Database cannot be opened / created an error is now displayed.
  • RDS Logfile window now shows Entry when displaying all fields, see image below.
  • RDS Logfile window now supports data sorting by clicking on the column headers.


Radio Data System(RDS) is a communications protocol standard for embedding small amounts of digital information in conventional FM radio broadcasts. RDS standardizes several types of information transmitted, including time, station identification and program information.


August 28th, 2025

  • SSB / AM squelch was missing the start and cutting off too soon. Also, the Raised cosine rise/fall was missing. Now, the SSB/AM squelch is more pleasant to listen to. Note: SSB / AM squelch uses voice activity detection, it is not rf-based.
  • RDS Logfile display no longer auto-updates if any of:
  • Edit window is visible,
  • Mouse has been active in the previous five seconds,
  • First entry is not visible.


August 23rd, 2025

  • Supports Winradio IQ files > 4 GB. These files, like ELAD's do not honour the WAV format correctly, but hey-ho.
  • When searching for Airspy HF+ / Discovery / ... SDRs the firmware is now shown in the Options field in the list of SDRs. Also shown in the logfile when connecting to the Airspy.
  • Option added to support logging programs when using a transmit up/ down converter definition, as we do with the Pluto on QO-100, see image below.
  • Previously FA, FB, ... returned the receive frequency (10 GHz) but on QO-100 we're actually transmitting at 2.4 GHz on the up-link.
  • When enabled, the actual transmit frequency (2.4 GHz) is returned.

Mode Mapping page is now Frequency, Mode.

June 28th, 2025

  1. Scheduled recordings now have an option to shut down the computer when the recording is finished.
  2. Streaming now compresses the data when the bandwidth is 5MHz or greater.


June 26th, 2025

  1. Preset recording definitions now include the action to take when the recording finishes, see image below.
  2. The Stop button in Ribbon bar, Home, Radio now stops the recording playback.

June 25th, 2025

  • Left and Right channels in Broadcast-FM swapped over, was reported that they were previously wrong. Please check!


June 22nd, 2025

  •  Custom layouts now restore the collapsed / expanded state of the Receive and Transmit panes.


June 20th, 2025

  • When the Microphone dropdown is opened in the Transmit panel the list of capture devices is re-enumerated and updated, so anything you plug in / out is reflected in the dropdown list without having to restart. Unplugging the microphone you are using is not supported, but you don't do that, right?
  • The TX relay can now be connected after starting, it will be opened when the next transmission is made.


June 19th, 2025

  • Reworked some MIDI support to reduce / eliminate crashes.


June 18th, 2025

Kits

The beta kits are here: https://www.sdr-radio.com/download#Beta

By Simon Brown September 14, 2026
History
By Simon Brown September 14, 2026
SDR Television v1.1.6 September 14th, 2026. To avoid confusion with the test versions of 1.1.5, this kit is now 1.1.6. Receiver Improved Gardner timing recovery. Improved Sum-product decoding. Redesigned soft decoder. Redesigned RRC matched filter. Note: this kit should be able to gain a dB or so sensitivity when detecting the frame header. v1.1.6 will have even better frame detection, hence better weak signal decoding. LDPS Settings, important! Open this page, select Defaults . There is no need to adjust the Sum-product optons, these options are only for development and may be hidden in future kits. Transmit Provider changed from SDR Television to SDR TV, some receivers only display a maximum of 18 characters in the provider field. Downloads are at the bottom of this page.
By Simon Brown September 14, 2026
Improving DVB-S2 PLHEADER Detection at Low SNR Reliable detection of the DVB-S2 Physical Layer Header (PLHEADER) is one of the first challenges faced by a DVB-S2 receiver. Before the receiver can decode the payload, it must determine where a physical-layer frame begins, establish carrier phase and frequency sufficiently accurately, and decode the signalling contained in the PLS code. This becomes particularly interesting at very low SNR. I have been comparing two approaches: A traditional differential SOF/PLS detector. A new coherent, maximum-likelihood-oriented PLHEADER detector designed to exploit substantially more of the information contained in the DVB-S2 header. Both methods are trying to answer essentially the same question: At what symbol does the DVB-S2 PLHEADER begin, and what carrier frequency and phase best explain the received 90-symbol header? The difference is how much of the available information they use to answer that question. The full PDF is here .
By Simon Brown September 13, 2026
Project for 2027? Love it or hate it, FT-8 is here to stay. I use WSJT-X to monitor 2m and sometimes 70cms. As a software developer, it's always rewarding to use one's own software. So I just asked ChatGPT whether it (he, she, they) even knew about FT-8. The response was amazing. So, this could be the start of a project which is also used for EME and meteor scatter modes. Read on dear reader, read on.
By Simon Brown August 27, 2026
August 27th, 2026 Default Audio Device When changing the default audio device selection in Windows, SDR Console was following the change but not reapplying the latest volume change. Example: I start playback, adjust the volume, then after a while enable my Bluetooth speaker an go outside. When the speaker is enabled SDR Console switches but didn't apply the change in volume. RDS processing AGC replaced with normalisation, Hilbert filter redesigned. Shouldn't make much difference. MIDI Startup I believe I have found the cause of the slow start of SDR Console. As part of the SDR Console startup I always call midiInGetNumDevs() to get the number of attached MIDI devices, even if the user hasn't enabled MIDI. At some stage in 2026 Microsoft introduced a bug where the first call to midiInGetNumDevs() after starting the computer results in blocking all asynchronous activity if there are no MIDI devices connected. If there are MIDI devices connected then it returns after ~100ms. I now only call midiInGetNumDevs() on startup if there are user definitions. Some programs are experiencing even worse behaviour. There should be a Windows update soon with a fix, but for now the kit below should resolve this problem in 99% of cases. Downloads Download beta kits here .
By Simon Brown August 26, 2026
QO-100 Footprints
By Simon Brown August 26, 2026
SDR Television v1.1.4 User Interface Rearranged ribbon bar, added Forward Error Correction (FEC) to the Home panel. Receiver Currently trying to improve LDPC decoding for low SNR. Part of this work involves reducing CPU load in the LDPC decoder. Planning to add advanced decoding in v1.1.5. Changed the list of FEC / LDPC algorithms, removing min-sum and min-sum correction. Optimised offset min-sum algorithm to reduce CPU load. Optimised Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) processing. Added sum-product. Corrected LLR soft scaling for QPSK. Changed default RRC filter length to 12 symbols, previous value of 30 was too long. Updated Feed-Forward AGC with a design from CoPilot. Optimised Gardner TED RRC filter length, now 25 taps. Increased the receive RRC filter rolloff factor by 25% to capture more energy with weak signals. Reset LDPC after 1 second of inactivity. FEC - LDPC There are now two LDPC algorithms, Offset min-sum, and Sum-product. Sum-product is more sensitive than offset min-sum but currently doesn't work at all for FEC rates lower than 1/2 (1/4, 1/3 and 2/5). When sum-product is selected and the rate is lower than 1/2 then offset min-sum is used. The default damping settings for sum-product are shown below.  The aim is to work on sum-product with the help of ChatGPT in 2027 to get the maximum possible sensitivity. Downloads are at the bottom of this page.
By Simon Brown July 27, 2026
July 26th, 2026 Reuter RSR200B Added initial support. Fobos Finalised support for Fobos SDR, only the Agile firmware is supported. Some early Fobos SDR units had HF2 and HF1 swapped on the case printing. FFT When using NVIDIA CUDA for the FFT the returned buffers now use memory from the heap rather than pinned memory (*). Reduced the CPU load in the FFT Helper DLL. The data from the FFT (CUDA, IPP, OpenCL) is processed to match the display DIPs. When running Broadcast-FM with x4 resolution there were 550 FFT bins per display pixel (DIP). These 550 bins were averaged which takes quite some processing, especially when running a matrix display with many receivers enabled. I now down-sample the bins to a maximum of (about) 32 which doesn't affect the display or any DSP but does reduce the CPU. Frequency Database Loading of the frequency database into memory-mapped backing now much faster. Pluto TX Doppler support for Pluto / LibreSDR. Have tested this by adding debug info, seems OK 🙂 . RDS Added variable font size in the RDS editor window. Forced uppercase of PS text in the RDS Editor removed. Change to RDS Logfile updates while the editor is open & visible. Updates are now allowed, previously not so. Recordings Fixed font size error in the playback, navigation window (was incorrect logic). When starting the video recorder a sanity check makes sure the selected folder exists and is accessible. Satellite Satellite definition file format has changed, no need to update your settings but support for the new OMM (.xml) format is included. I'm hosting satellite data on my (new) Akamai server, these is currently a cache of the Celestrak data. I'll add a web page soon which explains what's been happening. Transmit Audio mute is now a per-profile setting. Other Fixed an error opening the matrix display while the SDR was already started. Crash when selecting "Configure" from the Select Radio window fixed. Does not create an error when the graphics driver restarts.
By Simon Brown July 10, 2026
SDR Television v1.1.3 User Interface Fixed erroneous cursor flicker in Settings help text and Receive, Transmit panes. Fixed error in the spectrum squelch logic. Minor fix/improvement in QPSK LUT lookup for low values. Receiver Use highest possible quality decimation for symbol rates of 333ksps and lower. Added optional Doppler correction for LEO/MEO satellites such as MARMOTsat (July 2026). This will most probably be tweaked when the DVB-S2 transmissions started. Downloads are at the bottom of this page.