Building a Homemade LNA for RTL-SDR
Over on Reddit user soooooil has posted about his work in building an LNA, including etching the PCB. On his imgur page he shows the design and construction process through images, before showing the final result in SDR#. For the LNA he used a ERA-3SM+ MMIC which has 17-23 dB of gain and a NF of 2.6-2.8 dB. While the noise figure is fairly high for an LNA, it is still likely lower than the RTL-SDRs internal amplifier noise figure which is around <4.5 dB.
PSA4-5043 with IP3 at 28-31dbm or PGA-103 with IP3 at 36-40dbm with very low figure, 0.5 to 0.94db!
This two part as easy to use than ERA-3SM+ and do better job.
I use PSA4-5043 on my dongle and sensitivity to the original 5uV went down to 0.5uV.