I wrote that I have been tinkering with RTL-SDR to enable wide band receiving capability. I have a couple of different RTL-SDR variants:
One is equipped with Elonics EL4000 tuner, and the other one is based on R820T chip. Both work very nicely in Win7 with sdrsharp software. The difference between the two tuners is that the R820T should go down to 24MHz enabling receive on 12 and 10 meters without the need of upconverter.
The following is the screenshot from 10m band during the ARRL 10m contest last weekend.
Not much happening, but band conditions were terrible. Some signals coming through. I compared the receive capability with my Flex 1500. Same signals came through on both receivers. The benefit of using TV receiver USB stick is really the 2MHz pan-adapter. Based in initial experiments a band filter before the tuner is a must. Too much interference coming through from local FM stations.
I user my ole TS-2000 (modified) by transmitting 5W CW to a dummy load below 24MHz (low spec limit of R820T) and checked how low the receiver can actually go. And specs hold true. The R820T tuned at 24MHz with the low end of receive frequency at 23MHz. The tests confirm that R820T based TV tuner can receive 12 and 28m HAM bands without the need for upconverter.
Upconverter Tests to Follow
I do have two different upconverters. I did some tests with E4000 stick and the DxPatrol.com v4.0 upconverter earlier. I will report when I have time to compare DxPatrol kit to one that nooelec.com has in sale. I got my Nooelec.com upconverter just two days ago.
