Got MW & HF going. Had to select Direct Sampling (Q Branch) instead of the usual Quadrature.
With the 5' whip within a few feet of the laptop & its noisy PS-
Picked up two local strong stations stations on MW.
Got WWV at 10 MHz
And Voice of Greece on 9420 kHz. Opa!
Noisy and kind of crappy, but with that 5' whip next to the laptop, that was expected.
While switching to the outdoor antennas, the AC adapter came unplugged and noise went way, way down.
Have two antennas in use for testing for this - Bonito Boni-Whip & Wellbrook ALA100LN loop (~40' of wire), both into a phaser.
With maximum gain, the antennas saturate the SDR and there are images & noise all over the place.
When fine tuning the gain on various stations, the images will go away. Local strong stations sound good. Tried to get 540 WXYG on this (it sounds fantastic on my Yaesu FT-847 with these two antennas, at full gain). SINPO on the Yaesu is 55555 (for a little 850W station ~75 miles away), while on the RTL-SDR, its only 25353. The RTL-SDR struggled a bit with this one. At minimum images, it was a noisy signal, but still listenable.
Went back to Voice of Greece on 9420. When adjusting gain on the antennas, can get it in pretty good. Audio quality is still better on the Yaesu overall, which is not surprising as computer audio is usually mediocre at best. Will have to try this on my other PC that has a SoundBlaster X-Fi in it hooked up to 5.1 speakers.
Visited the 41m band. 7385 kHz was strong, brought up the gain and it sounded much better. No images on 7385, just increase in strength (as one would normally expect). Saw some stations above 8 MHz and tuned there to find that they're MW images. Turned down the gain and they went away.
The driver has RTL AGC & Tuner AGC, plus a gain control. When in Quadrature mode, we can fiddle with all three. When in Direct Sampling, only can check/uncheck RTL AGC, can't fine tune the gain. This would be a problem if we can't control the gain of the antenna. In my case, deselecting RTL AGC gives better signal control.
Also, sampling rate has an effect. 0.250 MSPS just makes noise & finds images, no useful audio. Useful rates are 1.024 MSPS to 1.4 MSPS (at least while listening to 540 kHz). Above 1.4 MSPS, its noise & garbage. Didn't seem to behave like this in the 31m band.
As long as you can adjust antenna gain easily, it seems to do a decent job. Its not a DX machine, but would be perfectly fine for casual listening. For $24.95, I'm not going to complain and will enjoy this device.
Will continue experiments with other antennas & things.
BTW: After composing this, tuned to 43m and saw activity... sure enough its Wolverine on 6940. Sounds fine on this except for a het on 6942.