Arinst Dreamkit SDR now on sale for $230 + Shipping
About a month ago we posted about the Arinst Dreamkit, which was an unreleased Russian made portable receive only SDR with 16-bit ADC, 1 - 3100 MHz tuning range, up to 5 MHz instantaneous bandwidth, and very fast scanning capabilities.
Reader 'sunny' has written in and informed us that the Arinst Dreamkit is now released and available for sale on both eBay and Aliexpress. The pricing is $230 + shipping costs. Sunny notes that the manual is only in Russian, and currently it does not have any digital decoding capabilities, and no preselector on the input.
Same here. Had mine for some weeks now. Excellent build quality but no built in band filters. I get FM band signals right across HF. These make HF reception useless. If I select WFM mode on hf I can listen to them as easy as I do on VHF. These stations are 35km away so not really close. Above 1ghz, I get AM broadcast station that appear in the spectrum and don’t move while tuning. This sdr has potential to be a real winner if it had some basic filtering and a tuning knob.
I received mine last week (9/30) after ordering it from AliExpress when its availability was announced. Firmware 1.0.2 out of the box and not able to update it due to them pulling firmware updates due to critical errors. These are being fixed and should be available soon. Out of the box and with a telescoping whip on it I find it to be a very sensitive receiver on VHF and above. Hoping for some added features such as step sizes and the ability to “snap to step”. I know squelch will be available in the re-released version. It will be interesting as this develops but I find it promising out of the gate.
I just received mine about 1 week ago, ordered from eBay. They had 15 available I think, but see they are now gone. Mine came with firmware 1.02, but I updated their firmware to 1.06. ( read the manual on firmware ) It has no bandpass filters that I know of. I hooked up my Wellbrook loop, and it overloaded it. I did have to use a bandpass filter ( AM Broadcast ) for SW and ham bands to remove the overloading. Very acceptable performance, in my opinion. It is indeed different to use, but fun. I paid 240.00 US. Bluetooth comes with it, and use that to connect to my speaker. The internal speaker is acceptable with plenty of volume, but my BOSE speaker is much better. Listening right now to RRI on 7375.00 kHz @ 00:42. Good signal, good audio and very nice. The specs say up to 31 MHz, but it is very good on the FM broadcast, 2M, and NOAA weather. Not sure what the specs are receiving wise now, because there has been a change with the firmware, but you can email them and ask. It also interfaces with HDSDR. This works well too, directions are in the manual. Not a bad radio for under 250. I also have the Russian Malachite ( from Russia ) and in my opinion the Malachite is easier to use, with performance similar. Build quality of the Arinst SDR is much better than the Malachite, but you need to get used to NO tuning knob. You must use the supplied stylus ( cheap ) or get another one, but if you do, get a firm pointy one, this works best. It also comes with a USB cord, and SMA adapter. Hope this helped. H