Both of my stations experience a fairly regular problem of the RTL-SDR somehow disassociating and then getting “purple” waterfalls. This happens every few months.
The solution is very simple. “Sudo Reboot” or simply unplug the pi and then plug it back in.
I’m wondering if there is a way (via a post observation script or something) that I can force my station to reboot maybe once a month? I would want to do it so that it was “smart” and didn’t foul an ongoing observation - so I don’t thing a simple cron job would work. Any suggestions for doing this? Or warnings against it?
There’s a way to completely power off the USB port. It did help preventing this issue on my station, but I don’t currently have access to look that command up. I run it after every observation
You have to find where usb has been “mounted” using “lspci | grep USB”
and with ls in /sys/bus/pci/drivers/*hci*. For example, for USB-3 it is in xhci_hcd/ on my Ubuntu.
Then you can reboot USB using:
echo -n “0000:00:1a.0” | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/unbind
echo -n “0000:00:1a.0” | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/bind