I've never been all that interested in radio, or spending any money on it, but when I saw a video describing these $20 RealTek chipset based dongles and how they could be used for SDR and radio spectrograph type applications, I was like "For $20? Count me in!"
Like most people I'm using SDR# and not any of the vendor's drivers. The thing that took me a little while to figure out was that the USB drivers for this thing have to be installed manually. (There's absolutely no "plug and play" support for this thing at all, because the driver used by SDR# is a very generic low-level USB driver that is only designed to allow applications to essentially talk directly to just about any USB device supporting some serial protocol.)
The easiest way to get this working is to download sdr-install.zip from the SDR# web site, extract it, and run the install script that will download everything you need including zadig (the generic USB driver installer), the RTL chipset plugin for SDR#, and SDR# itself.
Before running SDR# you need to run zadig.exe and use it to install the driver. This requires that you select "show all devices" from the Options menu, select your RTL dongle from the pop-up menu, and tell it to install/reinstall the WinUSB driver for that device. Be careful to select your RTL dongle before hitting install or you may accidentally install this over your mouse driver or some other device. (Like I say, this is a generic driver that installs a really basic software interface for any USB device that supports certain attributes, so there's nothing to stop you from overwriting one of the other drivers on your system if you select the wrong device.)
Once the WinUSB driver is installed you can just run SDR#, select the RTL device as the input, and hit play.
Tip: I'd recommend turning on the auto gain check box for the tuner ("Tuner AGC") in the configuration panel though, unless you want to mess with the manual RF Gain control. (I was able to do pretty well just using the auto gain, but before I enabled the auto gain every signal I was getting was very weak. So you really need some sort of gain adjustment be it manual or auto.)
Without much effort and using only the little included antenna I was able to pick up NOAA weather radio (narrowband FM), a number of commercial FM radio stations (wideband FM), the wideband FM transmission from a Sennheiser RS110 926MHz analog wireless headphone transmitter, and see a bunch of other signals on the spectrograph that I didn't recognize.
I was also able to pick up 2 or 3 ADS-B transmissions from commercial airplanes, even though I was sitting in my basement and using only the included antenna, though all of these airplanes were within the line of sight angle provided by the window in the room I was in. So this tuner seems to be good for ADS-B, but obviously you're going to need an unobstructed outdoor antenna of some sort to receive signals from all directions.
The remote control that comes with the dongle seems to be totally useless since it appears to be an IR device and I don't see how a computer can even receive a signal from it without a separate IR receiver device. (The NooElec dongle doesn't appear to have an IR receiver on it, but I could be wrong.) In any case it would require either the vendor's DTV software or some other software to make any use of it, and I don't know of anyone who's written anything useful that it can be used with.
At some point I'll probably buy a MCX to some sort of coax adapter and wire up a proper antenna for it outside, but for now I'm just messing with the cheapo little included antenna. It seems to work better than I expected.
Anyway, this is the most interesting $20 gadget that I've bought in a long time. I suspect that one day it will come in handy for helping to locate and rectify sources of radio interference.
| Brand | NooElec |
|---|---|
| Item model number | NESDR Mini |
| Item Weight | 2.33 ounces |
| Product Dimensions | 4.72 x 2.76 x 1.18 inches |
| Item Dimensions LxWxH | 4.72 x 2.76 x 1.18 inches |
| Color | Black |
| Voltage | 5 Volts |
| Manufacturer | Nooelec Inc. |
| ASIN | B009U7WZCA |
| Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
| Date First Available | October 21, 2012 |
