I recently bought and reviewed a portable SDR, a no-name clone of a Deepelec Malachite DeepSDR 101. While I didn’t like the radio, I liked the concept. It has the spectrum display where I can see nearby stations and compare signal strength, waterfall display, and high resolution tuning (1 Hz). My review explains how this didn’t work out in practice on the version I bought.
Genuine radios of this genre have firmware updates and improve over time. The one I bought wasn’t genuine; software is primitive, firmware upgrades don’t work, plus the hardware (MCU, RAM, filtering) are bottom of the line, and documentation is sparse.
There are, however, better, legit, licensed portable SDRs that have features like quick access to settings through the touch screen, separate knobs for volume and tuning, noise limiters, working AGC, filtering, firmware upgrades and less overload. When I looked toward buying something better, I had sticker shock, finding radical price inconsistencies, for example two Amazon sellers with one more than double the price of the other.
The models I’m looking at are:
- Malachite DSP SDR 1.10d V5
- Malahit DSP2 SDR
- Malahit DSP3 SDR
- MLite-880
My research indicates that the first 3 are licensed by the Russian Malachite developers and Deepelec is the only legitimate manufacturer outside of Russia, while the MLite-880 is a separate path developed by Chinese companies.
I did some AI aided shopping that told me I should be able to find reasonable prices, but in fact the usual suspects — AliExpress, Banggood, eBay and Amazon were double reasonable prices. I found one seller offering the MLite-880 for $180 and another asking $618.90. The AI says they are “between batches” and these high priced listings are opportunistic resellers or placeholder prices with no stock behind them.
What I’ve done is to follow the Deepelec store and “like” the Malachite DSP SDR 1.10d V5 product at AliExpress, with the hope they will notify me of price changes and if the DSP2 comes back into inventory.
I’ve decided to skip the MLite-880 because it doesn’t have a color display and I really don’t like how that looks.
If I could find a reasonable price, then I think I’d be happy with Malachite DSP SDR 1.10d V5 or perhaps an unannounced V6. The DeepSDR V6 advertised now is a fake (trust me, I have one).