New Products from Nooelec: Cheaper E4000 Dongles and a 9:1 Balun

The online store Nooelec has recently started selling two new RTL-SDR related products.

The first product is a lower cost RTL-SDR dongle with the E4000 tuner. The E4000 tuner was one of the original tuner chips used in RTL-SDR dongles when they were first discovered. Unfortunately Elonics, the company that owned the rights to the chip went under and the production of E4000 chips stopped, making them rare and expensive. The E4000 tuner has a tuning range of approximately 55 MHz - 2300 MHz, compared to the R820T tuner which has a range of around 24 – 1766 MHz. The cheaper R820T is better in most cases, but if you need the higher frequencies the E4000 may be an option. The new E4000 dongle is currently selling for around $50 USD, compared to the other E4000 models which went for around $100 USD.

E4000 Dongle from Nooelec
E4000 Dongle from Nooelec

They have also begun selling a low cost 9:1 balun for about $10 USD which can be used with a long wire (or random wire) antenna when receiving HF on the RTL-SDR with an upconverter. The impedance of a long wire antenna is approximately 450 Ohms (very approximate, impedance varies with frequency and length). A 9:1 balun allows a match with a 50 Ohm receiver, which is close enough to the 75 Ohm input of the RTL-SDR.

Nooelec 9:1 Balun
Nooelec 9:1 Balun
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Chris

I bought One of these via Amazon(e4000), not.really all that impressed with the performance as I expected, for the 80 bucks I spent..So far; all of my other sdr devices dwarf the performance of the revamped E4000.