RTL-SDR Blog V4 R828D RTL2832U 1PPM TCXO SMA Software Defined Radio (Dongle Only)

Very impressed with the ability of this device. I preloaded SDR# while waiting for next day delivery and once the RTL-SDR arrived I ran the batch file to copy the correct driver and then ran Zadig to install the driver. I put one of my HT antennas on the SDR and ran the SDR# software. Once configured it found the RTL-SDR device, but no signal, nothing wrong, just had to turn up the RF gain and viola. Thus far I have successfully tested broadcast FM, NOAA weather channel, and the 70cm Ham band. A disclaimer, I am an electronics hobbyist, licensed HAM, and a software developer, so YMMV...

Working great so far although its not exactly "plug and play" (which I expected) .. I'm using a Pi3 with the PI-SDR image. Works great with SDR++ on the image. The one issue I'm having is not being able to pickup AM broadcast bands. I suspect thats antenna related but not sure yet. This has been fun to play around with. Not allot going in my area with uv- vf so cant comment on that yet. I have a MLA-30+ antenna coming soon. Will update here more after that. I can say its definitely an improvement over ver 3 just because of the increased coverage. Looking forward to installing on a android tablet . Update - works great. Overall .. these are cludgy to use compared to a dedicated radio, but fun and allow you to learn and experiment with several spectrums of RF. I was finally able to get AM but ended up installing and using on a Win11 machine. You will probably want to set up multiple antennas to use with one of these. The MLA 30+ works great on HF and lower bands but truly doesnt perform well at all above 30 MHz (expected). For that I'm going to try a simple setup with a DPDT switch and use a long wire (by long I mean about 15 feet strung along the floor). The ability to go lower in the bands makes this a worthwhile purchase. I never went the route of the upconverter before because of the added cost and hassle . Plenty to experiment with and learn. Now that I feel like I have the antenna situation addressed and have a baseline I can start tweaking the software and bookmarking stations. Nice to have good sounding stereo FM radio available on my PC setup as well. I still have a couple things I want to try - like going portable in the camper, completing a comparison of SD# and SD++, things like that. This thing will keep me busy for a while.

This device is used to receive NOAA GOES-19 HRIT enviromental data at 1694.1 MHz. For the price, this is a very decent SDR, well regarded by enthusiasts. However, top end is 1.766 GHz and the V4 is running out of sensitivity at that point. The system here for receiving geosynchronous weather satellites is a 30" prime focus dish with the Nooelec feed system, about 20' of RG-8x cable to the SDR. Using Satdump software the average SNR is ~6.5 dB. This base system uses the SDRPlay RSP1a - at about 3X the cost of the RTL V4. The RTL-SDR produces an average SNR of 4.2. This is fine, as Satdump decodes reliably with 1 dB of headroom. No problem! For the price, the RTL-SDR is hard to beat. I have multiple SDR in the shack and this one is usually the choice for general work. There is a lot of junk out there in the SDR world...for general SWL use I highly recommend this unit. But, do your homework first...know your application. Regarding GOES-19 (EAST), my station sees it at 40 degrees of elevation from 72 degrees W.

4 stars because I love what it can do. But it definitely has some things you should know before you buy. I use sdrtrunk with windows. I also have a le potato that I've tried it on, with trunkrecorder. The combo of this dongle and SDRtrunk for windows just will not work on my AMDs properly. Flaky and random bus errors. Doesn't matter if I'm using USB 2.0 or 3.x. Doesn't matter if I'm using a powered hub. Doesn't matter if I'm using different ports. Just consistently bad. I tried every combination possible, and every solution online. Big waste of time. But it works fabulously even on every intel - including a 15+ yr old one. Both windows 10 and windows 11. BUT with one big caveat - Windows updates change the driver periodically UGH. When this happens, you have to manually use Zadig software to reinstall it - and it's not the most intuitive process, especially if you have multiple dongles. And you don't know it's a problem until you see that the tuners are showing just error messages. So I've resorted to pausing Windows updates for 30 days at a time, and then just doing them manually. I have 3 dongles (two v4 and one v3) hooked up to a USB 3 powered hub, uploading to both broadcastify and openmhz. It just works! One other caveat - if you get two dongles of the same version, for some programs you will need to use separate software to go in and change the ID number of one. Otherwise it gets confused. No problems once I did this step. On the le potato they just worked right out of the box. Highly recommend if you are looking for a cheap ems/fire/police scanner for nonencrypted areas. But you DO need someone who knows what they're doing helping you to get the software setup. Even getting advice on places like radio reference isn't quite enough if you're getting into this from scratch. But I love having this now that I've had a few months to play with it and enjoy!

Easy to use with software available on-line. Worked right out of the box!

Bought two they work great.

Excellent unit, works very well, good wide band coverage, easy to use. I use this with SDR Sharp right now, but plan on doing some Hydrogen Line radio astronomy with this one. That said, I've enjoyed searching different bands so much I need to get a second one for that! :)

Ottima, sotto tanti punti di vista. Bisogna fare riferimento alla documentazione ufficiale riportata nel sito. Bisogno installare driver e librerie C++ per farla funzionare. Poi va utilizzato uno dei tanti software a disposizione. L`ho installata con successo su Win11, Kali e Mac. Per linux bisogna aggiornare il source packages, ma con un pò di pazienza funziona tutto. L`utilizzo dei software come ad esempio sdr++, può avvenire solo dopo aver configurato correttamente i drivers. Funziona, basta seguire le guide. Dotatevi di antenne adeguate.

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ラズパイ５に使用し 普通に使えます

This is the second dongle I bought, and it works PERFECTLY after I did the RTFM trick The first one I bought, I couldn't get to work, so I sent it back because it would not connect to my Ubuntu OS This one, I googled how to install it to a linux computer and also installed GQRX as my receiver to receive 10Ghz amateur radio with a BullsEye LNB at 618.368.100USB it also lets me receive the same stations on my Quansheng WT unit at 618.100mhz

Funciona muy bien aunque si es muy necesaria una buena antena al exterior,