HF Reception with an EeePC and an RTL-SDR Blog V3 Running on a Raspberry Pi with SpyServer
Over on YouTube user IW2DZX has uploaded a video showing him using an old EeePC 900 to receive HF with an RTL-SDR V3 running in direct sampling mode on a Raspberry Pi 3 which is running a SpyServer. An EeePC 900 is an old netbook that was released in 2008 which is lightweight, portable and was fairly cheap. Second hand Eeepc's can now be found on eBay for less than $60 US.
By running the RTL-SDR on a Raspberry Pi 3 with SpyServer the need to have the dongle connected to the netbook is eliminated. Instead the radio data from the RTL-SDR is efficiently sent over a network connection and received via the WiFi on the Eeepc.
I also use an good old EEEpc900 (netbook ultrabook whatever…) one RTL-SDR V3 dongle listen to offline radio, especially on HAM bands. Surprisingly works good, it’s true to only 1.2MSPS, but because the display not big and not high resolution this good choice. And another fortunately things : use with HDSDR (hdsdr dot de) running on Windows XP. The computing power is sufficient even on high spectrum and waterfall rate and some noise reduction.