KKmoon 100KHz-1.7GHz Full Band UV HF RTL-SDR USB Tuner Receiver/ R820T+RTL2832U AM CW FM DSB LSB

Right! I will try to put this in some sort of Perspective, So for the price this SDR is well worth the money compared to Higher end SDR’s for instance the Funcube DongleRemember for around £22 for the Normal RTL This SDR is enclosed in an Aluminium box like Most high end SDR’sSO! Will this SDR go down to 100kHz and the Answer is Yes! Even down to 61KhzMSF UK and a lot lower Khz, So that was my Experiment will this SDR (RTL) does what it says on the tin! But had a few Issues with latest version of SDR Sharp with Q DSP But an Older Version was Better but found that CubicSDR worked Amazingly! Actually quite impressive!So Really Happy with this Amazon PurchaseCheersMark

I have used several of these RTL SDR devices and this one was disappointing in that it came with no information at all, not even a web address for you to go and do some research.The unit is provided with a USB lead and a small antenna, one thing about the antenna is that it has a slightly magnetic base but not magnetic enough to be of any practical use, it would fall over at the slightest thing even when mounted on a steel radiator.The actual RTL receiver is housed in a metal box that is nice to see from a shielding point of view. I found the performance on HF to be woeful, in spite of me having outside resonant antennas for all ham bands between 80-10m almost all signals where buried in the noise, signals I could clearly hear with my HF transceiver could not be heard at all or just barely heard with this device, a complete fail on HF as far as I'm concered.VHF/UHF was even worse the 2mtr band was obliterated by harmonics from commercial broadcast stations and the receiver seems to be completely overload by out of band transmissions, it was the same on 70cm no matter how much I turned the gain down.All in all I was quite disappointed my this RTL dongle.

I love it. Works well with SDR# (sdrsharp) software which is great on its own and also has plugins to add functionality. No information provided with the product so I had to go hunting on youtube. On my first session if about 2 hours I was quite dissolusioned but after another couple of youtube videos I managed to get it working properly and got the hang if changes that are required when switching between different bands and modes. Works well on amateur bands and has some nice filtering which is adjustable on the go. It has a few unwanted birdies but for the price it is amazing and 99% as good as the receiver on my FT1200 and the watrfall display is 300% better than the Yeasu. My first sdr. You can get similar items cheaper elsewhere but I bought this as it was available from uk stock.

This is one of them RTL2830U receivers, the KKmoon is similar to other brands using the same chipset and hardware, it’s cheap and bills itself as able cover 100khz to 1.7ghz and this is true to a degree. At £28 this is probably one of the cheapest wideband SDR’s available, and I mean it is dirt cheap considering even a basic Noolec NESDR and Ham it up would cost you at least £100, and for that price you might as well buy an SDRplay which is a better piece of kit for the kind of radio listening I do, especially if you use Windows.It comes in it’s own metal enclosure and comes with the most pathetic mag mount antenna imaginable, it might get you started on FM but anything in the HF range and below would be a waste of time with this, get yourself one of those clip on wire antenna's at the very very least.Word of warning, and this applies to all SDR receivers not just bargain basement ones like this. You need a good antenna to get anything worthwhile out of it at all. I’m using a 35m wire antenna, with a 1:9 balun. With an antenna like this it’s possible to pick up medium wave from all over Europe at night, never mind shortwave. It’s expected you learn the best times to do your listening for yourself. Shortwave always in the evening onwards, daytime is usually a waste of time though very early mornings can sometimes be fruitful.If there is any weakness in this device it’s LF and Longwave Broadcasts. It will pick up a 60khz time signal, but below 100khz things are very rough and muddy, in fact the sub 300khz performance isn’t the best, but above 100 khz things are workable on some broadcasts, Radio 4 was decent enough, RTL was rough, and you could pick up one or two European ones faintly, but in absolute honesty I’ve seen better on Longwave, you can if you're lucky squeeze a bit more out if you use a noolec flamingo AM to cut out the MW broadcast band which helps with overloading that this device is particularly susceptible to.At 147.3 khz there is a German weather RTTY stream, which even a Ham it up can pick up barely strong enough to decode it on my antenna, the KKmoon can’t even register it’s existence much less decode it, definitely a weak point for the KKmoon.Medium wave is substantially better but no better than a Ham it up with some scope for DX, stations as far as France and Spain, but no match for an SDRplay.HF performance was acceptable, however there was some significant overload in the presence of strong stations that cannot be filtered out.Despite the all in one look switching between frequency ranges is a faff, and I had to go fish for instructions on how to do that at first, no support. I make no wonder so many people couldn’t figure out how to make it work, I’m used to doing the hard work getting devices to work so it only took me 40 minutes to find the info I needed to get everything working, but we shouldn’t have to. A simple leaflet with some tips like put this into your device string in GQRX would save time and messing about.On Gqrx I had to use rtl=0,direct_samp=2 in the device string to get the 100khz - 30mhz portion to work. Thankfully despite being branded KKmoon its still just an rtl dongle at the end of the day.Overall I’ve found it to be less nuanced, less sensitive and more susceptible to noise and overload then other more expensive products, though to be fair it’s actually better than a HackRF at HF frequencies and obviously MW and LF frequencies which the HackRF doesn’t really do at all, and really when all said and done this thing is less than £30 and as long as you hook a decent antenna to it things are going to be reasonable enough except on LF where this device struggles. Be sure to get yourself a balun and throw at least 15m of wire at it to make it worth while, this goes for any sdr or radio for that matter.

This SDR radio works very well, but comes with no paperwork or any instructions at all. The radio is advertised as fully plug and play, this is not the case. When plugging it into a windows 10 computer absolutely nothing happens. You need to be fully computer literate to make this radio work as it involves finding and downloading three applications and modifying certain files on your computer to make it work. This can all be researched on YouTube.Once its all installed correctly, and you find your way around the application software its a great bit of kit. Unfortunately It had to loose one star due to its total lack of paperwork.