One dongle uses the FC0013 tuner, and the other uses the R820T chip. Gough opens the dongles up and inspects their electronics and gives his opinions on the design.
One of the alternative R280T models with a PAL antenna connector
Nobu Saito, a Japanese RTL-SDR hardware developer has come out with a modified RTL-SDR which has a +-2PPM 28.8MHz Temperature Controller Oscillator (TCXO) instead of the standard 28.8 MHz stock oscillator. (Note this link is machine translated to English from Japanese).
Normally 28.8 MHz TCXO’s are difficult to find, but Nobu was able to find a source in Japan, and he is now selling on his Amazon Store (with international shipping) modified dongles.
The oscillator on the RTL-SDR is prone to thermal drift, which means that as the dongle heats up from use, the frequency you are tuned to may change over time. A TCXO compensates for differences in temperature, and thus keeps the frequency stable as the temperature changes. This is extremely useful for applications such as receiving GPS, Beacons, APT, HFDL, and for radio astronomy.
a tool inspired by tentacle. It automates the task of sniffing GSM frames of the air, extracting the key exchange, feeding kraken with the key material and finally decode/decrypt the voice data. All You need is a USRP (or similar – [RTL-SDR]) to capture the GSM band and a kraken instance with the berlin tables (only about 2TB )
If you’re new to the world of low cost software defined radio, and have just been through our Quickstart guide, this YouTube tutorial video by Clayton Smith on using the SDR# program may be useful to you.
In the video Clayton explains how to use SDR# and some of its many features, how to calibrate the RTL-SDR offset in the software, and he also shows how to receive a few interesting signals in his area.
To use the app, you will need an Android device that supports USB OTG, which most Android devices on Android 4.0+ should support. You will also need a USB OTG cable, and an RTL-SDR dongle. You may want to consider a USB OTG cable that has a second port for external charging capabilities, as the RTL-SDR can drain the battery quickly.
The app is cheaply priced at under $2, so give it a try!
YouTube user Brad Bowers has posted a video showing GQRX running on his BeagleBone Black with an RTL-SDR dongle. The BeagleBone Black is an embedded Linux computer, similar to the Raspberry Pi, but with significantly more processing power. He found that GQRX actually performed quite responsively on the BeagleBone.
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