Can anyone familiar with Console V3 used with RSP2 tell me (as the behaviour of this RF gain control seems to produce some bizarre results):

Is this control actually a normal gain control (i.e. Max = Max gain) or is it reversed as seems to be the weird way SDRPlay have chosen to implement it in SDRUno, where the MAX settings appears to be Max attenuation i.e minimum gain?

If the behaviour was predictable as in a conventional analogue receiver then I would not  need to ask, but have some situations where max gain reduces the strength of the received signal, and other situations where the reverse is true so want to be sure of what it is actually doing.

As an aside, the whole manipulation of the RF gain and IF gain on this receiver appears to be a bit of a mystery (though 'starred' settings do admittedly usually produce the required results). There seems to be powerful AGC action going on at maybe more than one point in the receiver so that these controls often seem to do nearly nothing at all. Other times they make massive difference. Quite frustrating not to know what is going on! On my Drake C-Line it's all so so predictable (but with a much 'narrower' viewpoint of the band, HI HI!)

73, Max

Well,  out of ALL the SDRPlay RSP2 servers, ONLY one out of eleven would work (no username/password, unable to connect, dead, offline, etc). From what I saw via testing, the RF Gain and the IF Gain selection does absolutely nothing. But I could only test one RSP2 (M0VCP), so not sure if that's a valid test.

I do know on the RSP1 (I have one and it DOES work), the RF should be set to Min (especially  on lower bands), IF at -35dB Manual (if on automatic, the AGC pumps wildly and you can see and hear the results), and Visual Gain at 0dB.

Here's with RF Min, IF -35 Auto (notice the horizontal dark bands!), and  Visual Gain at 0dB, and my AGC set for Fast on 75M at 1PM local (no signals):



Here's with the same above except the IF is at -35dB Manual, and AGC set on fast at 1PM local (no signals on 75M):




73 Kriss KA1GJU

Attachments:

• AGCPumping.png
• AGCSmooth.png

Hi Max

http://www.sdr-radio.com/Radios/SDRplay

In SDRC3, 0 is max gain (from memory)
check out the link

in UNO the default is Gain Reduction (not gain) but this can be changed

for HF and LF the Hi-Z port works better than the SMAs in the RSP2

Gain control is a different "beast" than in classic radios. (Need to find sweet spot between noise figure and dyn range. Sometimes, ext preconditioning BPF / attenuators are required to tailor your antenna for best performance)
plenty of info and videos out there explaining this 

Hope it helps

73 Angel
M0HDF