A review of the Soft66RTL3 RTL-SDR + Upconverter + RF Amp Combination Circuit
Over on the SWLing Post blog contributor Mike Ladd has posted up a review of the Soft66RTL3 software defined radio. The Soft66RTL3 is a fully enclosed SDR unit that consists of a standard mini RTL-SDR dongle, a selectable upconverter circuit, several switchable bandpass filters for HF and a UPC1688 RF amp which is enabled in HF mode and is controllable through a trimmer pot. The selectable bandpass filters are from 0.4 MHz to 1.2 MHz, 1.2 MHz to 5 MHz, 5 MHz to 15 MHz and 15 MHz to 30 MHz. The unit also comes enclosed in an aluminum box with an SMA input connector and Micro-B USB port.
The Soft66RTL3 is custom produced by Kazunori Miura (JA7TDO) who is based in Japan. The Soft66RTL3 sells for $40 USD shipped, or $46 USD shipped with registered air mail.
In the review Mike shows us the insides of the Soft66RTL3 and discusses its features. Later he also shows an installation and user guide.
I am doing direct sampling and using a MFJ1020 witch is a amplified pre-selector ,and I still have to use a FM trap . The pre-selector for some reason doesn’t filter that out . I will admit that I have no problem with AM at all .
I am a little confused . Why you use a pre-selector with a up converter ?????????????? You have not disabled the tuner . Now I can see using a pre-selector in a dongle that is direct sampling because the tuner has been disabled . With out a pre-selectorthe RTL2832 would see everything in the universe .
If there are strong out of band signals (for example the broadcast AM band), then they can still overload the receiver. Using filters stops this.