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Author Topic: New version of RTL-SDR.com dongle now available  (Read 8029 times)

Offline Josh

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Re: New version of RTL-SDR.com dongle now available
« Reply #15 on: September 07, 2016, 2354 UTC »
That'd be neat of you could df with it.
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Offline Josh

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Re: New version of RTL-SDR.com dongle now available
« Reply #16 on: September 19, 2016, 1522 UTC »
Am evaluating one right now for hf, so far it's promising. A highpass filter or preselector at the antenna port really is needed to reduce images and imd, but other than that it works wonderfully with my fav sdr app hdsdr even without preselection. The antenna system is a ocfd (obsessive compulsive fed dipole) up about 30 ft via rg6 and a b&w 30MHz lowpass filter straight to the sma.

Very low cpu usage once hdsdr is set up to draw the waterfall a bit slower. Anyway, as mentioned before the sample rate has interesting effects, too high and the panadapter is stunning to view (many signals may prove to be imd or images) but performance lacking on the channel of interest, too low and it seems to degrade dynamic range. I find the 256 sample rate causes audio output to be oddly hindered while 1m and up to 2.4 does very well in all instances, I settled on 1m.

The various decoder apps seem to leap into action once near a given signal derived via the dongle, I attribute this to the dsp filtering and tcxo. Speaking of the tcxo, wwv @ 15 was one cycle off in ssb mode and pretty much perfectly stable, how's that for a 20 dolla dongle. I had read about instances where the case got almost too hot to touch, mine ran at room temp with hours of use, perhaps higher sample rates makes it heat up.
We do not encourage any radio operations contrary to regulations.