Nooelec RTL-SDR v5 Bundle - NESDR SMArt HF/VHF/UHF (100kHz-1.75GHz) Software Defined Radio. Premium RTLSDR w/ 0.5PPM TCXO, SMA Input, Aluminum Enclosure & 3 Antennas. RTL2832U & R820T2-Based Radio

The NESDR SMArt v5 Bundle comes with 3 aerials, short one is for UHF ( suitable for 500MHz - 1900MHz), the mid size for 70cm (400MHz - 470MHz) and telescopic aerial can be adjusted to the desired frequency.If you know the frequency range you want to tune in, you can achieve very good results by using telescopic aearial and any online Vertical Antenna Calculator.I have used this SDR mainly for Weather Baloon Radiosonde Tracking with Raspberry Pi4 2GB and software from SQ6KXY.Over the weeks I have tested it with Mac and many different flavours of Linux on a X86_32, X86_64 and ARM 32bit and 64bit (Raspberry Pi) platforms. Each and every time SDR was recognised without any issues.My unit has been in 24/7 operation for for several weeks now, while it gets fairly worm, it works reliably.It can receive clear signal from radiosonde 200km away at 30,000m altitude with 1.5m diapole antenna. The digital signal is clear and received messages do not contain errors.I have tested it on most Amateur Radio bands too, and ADS-B for flight tracking all with great results.I can highly recommend NESDR SMArt v5 Bundle to any radio enthusiast. I will be ordering more of those SDR's for my RX project to be able to cover more frequency ranges at the same time.All the best

Excellent piece of kit. Needed it to test if some vehicle key fobs (which dont have replaceable batteries) were emitting a signal after the central locking stopped working. Worked a treat with free Android software.

Well, this receiver is very nice for starters, especially the ones who never played with SDR based radios. So I've would rate this 5 out of 5 on this one. However, I've ran into issues with drivers, and the software, out of 5 softwares only one worked. Dont get me wrong, thats not a complain because it could be just misconfigured software( since I never got that far, because 1 software works well with -SDR# ). The radio itself is a bit noisy, but it's fixable if you have steady hands and a bit of SMD soldering experience in past. The casing itself looks solid, however, I would strongly suggest you to use SHIELDED USB extension coord, because radio itself is a bit too heavy for USB port, and it may damage your port. The antennas are Okay, possible to catch airplanes and airport with telescopic antenna , and 10 metres above sea floor. In general, considering price/reliability/performance, I've would give a strong 4/5.

UPDATE: After removing the plastic case and putting the AC on 18'c in the office.... it works well.Bought one of these in December 2016 mainly to use as a Spectrum Analyser and band monitor to check for illegal radio users interfering with my licensed DRM repeater. Very impressed with its performance. A little tricky to get working under Windows 10 x64 and to persuade SDR# to recognise it but once working it is great. I have a proper wideband scanning aerial on my radio tower which helps but when I tried this with the supplied magmount and telescopic aerial on a biscuit tin at my house I was very surprised how sensitive it was. Actually not selective at all and suffers overload from strong nearby transmissions. This is where one needs to be an experimenter - I found the strong signal and made a simple notch filter to compensate.Unfortunately the SDR met an untimely end, it fell out of my rucksack, unbeknown to me and was accidentally run over by a 6.5 ton armoured vehicle the USB plug is bent but probably it could be repaired. Easiest to just buy another SDR, which I did...... now waiting for delivery.When you order these SDR, the seller emails you via Amazon with the links for the software and this works "out of the box" although not as good as SDR# and the multitude of plugins it easliy shows the capability of the device.

The item itself works well or certainly as expected with a reasonable learning curve with the software side, so no complaints on the item itself.However, I paid extra for the option with the 3 antenna's for which were much smaller than expected when they arrived. In fact at first I thought I had a faulty item as I was picking up nothing except some rather poor sounding FM broadcast radio stations. Tweaking or repositioning the antenna helps with radio stations but even when I got to grips with the software it soon became obvious and confirmed via research and third party people that the 3 desktop mini antennas are at best of very limited use and next to unless in a lot of locations. Of cause I'm not expecting to pick up transmissions from 50-200 miles + away eith a desktop antenna, but im struggling to pick up much at all outside of broadcast radio stations and it would certainly have been reasonable to have expected to pick-up something even with these small antennas in the suburbs of a major city with loads of retail locations within 2 miles of my location.This item description should be made clear of the reception limitations of the included antenna's. Had I realised the 3 antenna's were just to limiting I'd not gave took that option and instead put the extra money to a decent desktop antenna instead.

This comes with a USB extension lead (with ferrite core) so you don't need to buy this an extra. All you have to do is download and run the software to get it going. To save you what took me a day to sort out go straight to airspy.com/download/ and download SDR#. Next INSTALL RTLSDR, this will put the ZANDIG file in the same directory. Use ZANDIG to load the correct drivers for the dongle. NOW run RTLSDR and you should very quickly be able to load up an FM radio channel and listen to some music. I started off using HDSDR software and got nowhere when it came to listening in to an FM radio channel - probably me - but SDR# was just way quicker and way simpler to use. Enjoy!!!