RTL-SDR Blog V3 R860 RTL2832U 1PPM TCXO SMA Software Defined Radio (Dongle Only) (Black)

Hey, if you dont know how to use a SDR, I highly suggest to look up a guide on how to start receiving with a SDR. I think its a pretty good unit, and as the title says, it's way better than the NooElec one that is in the picture. Now all the reviews that say its a terrible device, those are 95% of the time just user error. I've been using SDR stuff on and off for about 3 years, and there is a little bit of setup required, as with everything. Now I've been farting around with the NooElec one, but I decided to get a little bit of a step up. This has HF reception, just not very good in comparison to a proper transceiver. Its a good idea to get a proper antenna if you want to do some serious HF stuff. An alternate idea is to grab a balun, and a roll of speaker wire and split it so you have 2 wires then put it up as a dipole. And, you can even hook it to your rain gutters if they are metal, and use that as a receiving antenna. Cheap, but effective. Some people receive weather satellites with these, ive had some luck with the NooElec unit but this one just blows it out of the water. Ive used it to pick up images from NOAA weather satellites, and it does an incredible job of that, and my setup utilizes a LNA that can be powered by the built in Bias-T. If it gets too hot for your liking, you can ziptie a heatsink with a thermal pad to the back of it and cool down the RTL-SDR. I made sure to take a high res pic so you can look closely at the differences between the two SDRs.

I am extremely impressed with this receiver. I have been involved with ham radio and short wave listening for over 50 years and have worked in the two-way radio field almost that long. I put the RTL-SDR through its paces both on the test bench and in my home ham station. I am amazed at how well it performs. One thing must be understood. It doesn't matter if the radio is a $20 USB dongle or a $5000 deluxe receiver; the radio is only as good as the antenna you connect it to. At home I connected the RTL-SDR to the same antennas I use with my $1300 Icom transceiver. I could find no signals, that I could hear on the Icom, that the dongle couldn't hear. Also, with the adjustable bandwidth control in the SDR# software, the dongle did almost as good of a job of separating signals in the crowded ham bands. The receiver is NOT a no brainer. You must be able to follow the setup instructions on the quick start page. You need decent antennas appropriate for the frequency ranges you want to listen to. An antenna that works great at VHF and UHF "scanner" frequencies is useless for reception at short wave or AM broadcast frequencies. A basic understanding of how communications receivers work helps a lot. You will however need to learn the software and a lot of its features are not "intuitive." The RTL-SDR is, in my opinion, the most bang for your buck of any receiver ever made. Bob Mason WB8CAC

I've only used this for a couple hours now, but man was this easy to set up and awesome to use. It is very fun to visually see and navigate through the radio signals. It took me less than 10 minutes using their quick start guide on rtl-sdr.com/qsg I gained confidence before purchasing this device from all the positive reviews of course and mainly their website. The website is easy to navigate and I was overjoyed to see how detailed the troubleshooting guide was, so if I ran into any problems I could very likely find a solution. It is nice to see such a detailed troubleshooting page with pretty much any possible problem that could happen with this device. Anytime I jump into a DIY project i'm afraid I will have to use google for 3-4 hours to find a solution. I only ran into one problem during set up with the software and that was on the step that said to run the batch file in the extracted folder of the SDR# software. Probably because I am on a Domain computer with security settings that prevent batch files from running. Well in that same step on their quick start guide they had a link to manually install the drivers instead which only took a minute to do. I followed the rest of the steps. Plugged in the RTL-SDR with my ICOM female SMA antenna from my HAM radio and sure enough it came alive instantly. I was amazed at how easy it was to set up. I turned up the gain in the software and I could start finding random HAMs in my area and various repeaters. I couldn't find any HF signals probably due to my antenna. Their website suggests getting a planar disk antenna or a discone antenna for listening on nearly any frequency between 25Mhz and 1300Mhz. My HAM rubber duckie antenna with this picked up a lot of signals from local FM radio, 136Mhz-900Mhz. This is definitely an awesome buy for the price of $17. I just bought a Uniden BC125AT handheld radio scanner for $110 earlier this week. It is a handy device since it is portable, but it has only a small portion of the frequency range compared to SDR. For $110 it isn't worth it for what it does so I am definitely returning it after playing with this thing. I'm excited to experiment more with it to find other neat uses for SDR. I highly recommend getting a USB extension cable for this device so you can have enough cable to work with. I happened to have a 10ft USB Amazon extension cable I bought a couple months ago that works perfectly for this. Since I am using this with a rubber duckie antenna it is about a foot long sticking out of the computer. Not an ideal location for this since it wouldn't fit well behind the computer and I would likely break it if it was sticking out the front of the computer. It would even be good for a laptop since all laptop USB ports stick straight out the side. A USB extension cable allows you to place the device and antenna in a much better location. My last recommendation for full use of this is a discone antenna as the company suggests or something better than a simple rubber duckie or whip antenna. This thing is too cool to only use it with a rubber duckie. Just buy it!

Great fun amazing product recommend for anyone interested in listening to whats going on around them in the world

si eres radioaficionado y no quieres invertir mucho, es para ti

Everything works as intended. Product arrived on time.

J ai un hackrfone un sdrduo je signale que je fait que de l ecoute . Et je peut vous dire si vous voulez quelque chose qui fonctionne et recoit tres bien prenez ce produit .

Excelente, entrega rápida e eqpto funcionando