This is a great piece of tech and I have barely scratched the surface in its capabilities. It was purchased to be able to listen to FT8 transmissions. In the future it will be used in many ways I can not imagine yet. Please note that a great deal of learning is needed to truly get this thing working how you need it too. Also the infinite levels of tweaking will kill a mere mortal.
First off I would like to point out that after I purchased this I received an email from the seller outlining that the drivers are very important. Thank you to the seller! Follow their directions and it is pretty painless, as long as you are familiar with software installation. If not then Youtube is your friend. This is the first time a vender has warned me ahead of getting their product. The CubicSDR software that they ask you to use, I did not like, but it works. May be fine for you. So far I have settled on using AirSpy SDR, it pipes the audio to a Virtual Cable software and it then sends it to WSJT-X. Just search this on Youtube if you are interested. It seams to display everything I am wanting. Waiting on my cables to hook up my radio. Stinking covid...
I watched a pile of video's and read what I could find before I got this. If there is a better one for the cost, I did not find it. There are more expensive ones that will transmit as well.
Now I want to call out the guy that said you could use 75 ohm TV coax when you are listening only... Well if you tweak it for about 10 hours, sure you can hear something. Maybe even get some FT8 through it. But no you will not like it at all. I'm no rocket surgeon, but I can tell you what I see.
The Ham It Up converter that I received requires a -125,000,000 Shift to be put into the SDR software. It is important, at least in AirSpy that the offset has comma's in it. Even though it shows dots in the menu. This was close to an hour of Googling.
This guy does run hot! So far it has not given out. But I place it where it can get as much air as possible.
Lessons I learned the hard way:
Extend your USB cable before you use a length of cable between the SDR and your antenna. I found that if I had a 16 foot of "China Best RG-58u" in the mix, I received no signals that could be processed for FT8 and mostly noise. The cables and adapters just produced to much loss i guess? The connectors that I received are good. Use a meter to test the ones you get, just to be sure. Cables that you buy need tested as well.
The antenna's that you get, make sure you know which one to use. Bigger is not always better. Look online for an antenna calculator and plug in the frequency you want to hear and it will give you the 1/4 wave length, then setup your antenna accordingly. Look up this kit on youtube and see how to configure the balun for longwire and dipole antennas. This is the only antenna that has worked for me. The others are for wave lengths I'm not interested in yet.
One antenna will not do everything.
I did try using this on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ and a Pi 4 2 gig and I found that the cpu was not enough to get rid of clipping in the audio. Pi's are great, but not for this in my mind. The software was running the cpu's at 100%.
I now run it on a Windows 10, i7 . Nothing is lost and it runs at 20% cpu.
| Nombre de marca | NooElec |
|---|---|
| Dimensiones del producto | 11,81 x 9,06 x 1,57 pulgadas |
| País de origen | EE. UU. |
| Número de modelo del producto | NooElec NESDR SMArt HF Bundle |
| Descatalogado por el fabricante | No |
