The Effect of Noise Produced by the RTL-SDR

Over on YouTube Adam, the creator of the LNA4ALL, LNA4HF and UP100 upconverter has uploaded a video showing that the noise that is produced by the RTL-SDR dongle itself can degrade performance when combined with an LNA and/or upconverter.

Most commonly we’ve seen people mount the RTL-SDR dongle together with an upconverter and/or LNA in the same shielded box right next to each other. However, these results show that the RTL-SDR should be shielded separately from the LNA and upconverter for best performance.