I did some experimentation with the $20 dongle vs the FunCube dongle for receiving weather satellites.
If you live in an RF dense area, like here in Southern California, they BOTH benefit from having some front-end filtering added.
Other wise you have to turn the RF gain down quite a bit on both of them to prevent 'break through' from strong signals that can be may MHz away from your band of interest.
In my case, I used an SSB Electronik 2 Meter preamp with an old M2 2 Meter Eggbeater antenna. I could get reasonable copy above 10*~15* elevation with just the dongle and antenna, but suffered from strong signal break through. If I turned the RF gain down to where the interfering signals no longer broke through, it cut my reception down to maybe 25*~30* elevation.
With the SSB preamp and it's built-in helical filter, even operating at 137 MHz, the difference was staggering, and I could get good copy down to 5* or so.
The only other SDR I played with for a while was the HackRF, which I found to be unsuitable for what I was looking for. Despite the hype behind it, it's still an 8-bit unit with limited dynamic range.
YMMV!
73, Jim KQ6EA
On 06/16/2016 08:33 PM, Peter Laws wrote:
On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 3:22 PM, Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK) amsat-bb@wd9ewk.net wrote:
Unfortunately there isn't anything in the middle ground between these dongles and devices like the
The $20 versions are well worth the effort if you've never played with an SDR of any sort before. For satellite downlinks? Dunno, never tried. Surely as you describe!
Has anyone done any kind of "shoot out" comparing the cheapos to the real ones or even between the real ones (FCD, SDRPlay)? Before I plunk down $200, I'd like to see what I'm getting ... over and above what my $20 dongle can do, of course. :-) I read what you typed, but I'd like to see numbers.