scanSydney

I'm after some help in selecting a suitable USB tuner for SDR applications. I understand I need one that is compliant with RTL2832U and 820T. I'm only interested in ~30mhz up and it will mostly be for UniTrunker on a laptop. Not looking at spending more than say $40.

From reading this forum there are a number of different makes or models mentioned. This one has also been recommended to me elsewhere - http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NooElec-NESD ... 23441b48c8

Could those who have more knowledge than me on the matter advise what dongles they use, and if possible provide a link to online sellers.

TIA.

NooElec are fantastic. When I went to GRcon (GNUradio con) last year they were handing out the cheaper dongles.

The NooElec products are designed for SDR enthusiasts and come with a small antenna and adaptors so you can convert MCX to SMA etc for other RF applications.

Cheers,
Matt

Thanks Matt.

I purchased the above dongle yesterday. Hopefully will be here sometime next week.

The NooElec tuner arrived earlier this week and I've only had small opportunity to use it over the last couple of nights. Have found tha with the supplied antenna I can't pick up much more than commercial radio stations and super strong local signals. I've ordered an adapter to allow the connection of a more suitable antenna, so will advise how I go when this arrives.

I have the same one and not impressed with it , I have it hooked up to a whip antenna on a tripod.

As luck would have it the MCX to SMA adapter arrived in the post yesterday while I was at work and I've had a bit of an opportunity to use the tuner more this morning. I've plugged it into an old MobileOne 'Scantnna' I have and using SDRSharp I can clearly detect signals all through the bands. I've run it with UniTrunker as well and am decoding local GRN towers between 90-100%, which is so better than I get with a discriminator tap. I'll try and do some DMR decoding over the weekend to see how that goes.

It is certainly more fiddly to set up, and I'm finding at this early stage setting have to be far more exact, specifically gain, etc. I'm finding around 400-480MHz the tuner needs a correction of about 25,000ppm to be spot on.

I find it pretty impressive that this $35 dongle can essentially, with freeware software, do more than the latest $600 scanner. It's a different way of doing things and will take a bit of getting used to, but does seem to be where the future is heading.

With a bit of engineering and programming knowledge it would be entirely feasible to have a couple of these dongles running through a small computer (Pi or similar?) in a box the size of a 996 scanner or smaller and be able to decode and listen to absolutely everything digital and trunked (encryption excluded of course). Maybe the future of scanning is not dead??