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!

Update: Audio Fix Found; reported solution to Tom The Dilettante & TheSmokinApe's videos on Youtube. Rating Update: previously, 1-star; updated to 4-stars; would have given it 5-stars if the installation process wasn't so convoluted regarding manual intervention of drivers which can cause similar problems. Performance and capabilities, as well as add-on applications are very impressive for the price. Does not substitute for a real HAM or similar high-end radio/amplifiers/huge antennas, but that's not a valid comparison to make. I know those with the high-end radios, but that's not my intentions with this device. Learning more about it, sure, but this is a great alternative that doesn't require a huge investment or giant antenna most HOAs or apartments won't allow outside/visible. Regarding the "paDeviceUnavailable" error message I was getting when I selected the RTL-SDR USB and hit "Play". That followed with crashing my audio and video on Youtube as well, where it told me I had an audio renderer error, but it also refused to play the video (without the audio) as well. The error message received on trying to play a Youtube video was regarding that renderer error but said to reboot my machine. I found that instead of rebooting I could just refresh the browser and it plays audio & video just fine. The solution so far, is this: Select Audio Output to, instead of Microsoft MME Speakers, ...to ASIO4ALLv2 (or any other output device other than the default) and it suddenly worked! I had an ElGato video/audio capture card and had to install some virtual audio devices a few years ago which may be related to the problem. Anyway, for now it works as long as I change the Audio Output to the other 'device'. Thanks for the detailed video, right to the point and with good links and content! I posted the same message on TheSmokinApe's Comments section in case anyone else runs into the same or similar issue. Previously: I have no idea how anyone got this system to work, clearly there is a major discrepancy. I have a relatively high end laptop for CAD modeling that works great but cannot get past this very simple starting point of running the SDR software initially, no matter how many instructions I follow to a "T". Another reviewer showed a completely different software package SDRConsole and that is the only way I can get this SDR dongle to do anything at all. I was a bigger fan of the originally touted software SDRSharp but it wipes out my computer's ability to even play any videos' audio when I follow all of the instructions. I will give it 1 week and will otherwise send it back baffled out how this is such a well supported SDR unit but it can cease to function on a relatively solid laptop with an experienced engineer who runs software and hardware every day as a job and at home.

I have been trying to dial in audio for the drive-in movies for a long time. With this thing connected to my computer then from my 1/8 out to xlr cable (ballanced) to my soundboks 3. It works perfectly. Could finely tuned the input eq everything to a nice well ballanced audio with zero lag. This is the only way to go. Then use skaa to "team up" my other soundboks. Got beautiful stereo audio!!! Thanks rtl-sdr!!

Excellent for my SDR P25 scanner. A couple of these and some free software and you have a CHEAP P25 police scanner, short wave receiver, ADS-B Plane mapper, Weather satellite recorder, FM stereo, and a NUMBER of other radio receivers! If you've ever even WONDERED what you can pick up on radio, these will let you know!!

I have the v4 version as well as this, the v3. While the v4 gets the job done, the v3 appears to work better than the newer version. I run an ADSB receiver, the v4 the max range was 103, and the average was 67. I decided to buy the v3, range is now 127 miles, average is 81. I ended up using the v4 for 978. You can’t wrong with either one, but the v3 works better in my setup.

Try this. Very fun hobby! I mean it.