RTL-SDR Blog V3 with Dipole Antenna Set back in stock at Amazon USA (New Black Design) + Chinese New Year Holiday International Shipping Note

Just a quick note to say that our RTL-SDR Blog V3 with Dipole Antenna Set is now back in stock at Amazon USA! This set includes the new black dongle enclosure design.

The RTL-SDR Blog V3 dongle by itself is also in stock at Amazon USA in both the older silver and newer black design.

Pricing remains the same as usual, $29.95 for the dongle by itself, and $39.95 for the dongle + antenna kit. We are doing our best to hold inflation costs down and keep the same pricing, but we can't guarantee that these prices won't need to increase later in the year.

Regarding the new black design, we are currently in the process of transitioning our silver enclosures over to the newer black enclosures. The reason is mostly for regulatory compliance reasons. We're required to have a clearly printed FCC compliance statement on the product. In order to get clear small font text we have to laser etch the text, but laser etching only shows up on dark surfaces. Most black surface coatings tend to be electrically insulating, however we wanted to assure customers that we have managed to find a black plating process that retains the excellent conductivity of the bare silver. Keeping the enclosure electrically conductive ensures excellent shielding of the PCB.

Secondly the black design with our branded logo clearly displayed will help set us apart from the fake products that have now copied our silver enclosure design almost exactly. Those clones generally have a poor quality RTL-SDR dongle circuit inside, but are made to look like our official dongles in order to mislead customers. The clearer branding will also give us more authority to take down listings of any fake dongles that copy our branding in the future.

Note that there are no changes to the circuit design, this is purely a cosmetic change.

As a second note, we wanted to inform potential customers that it is currently the Chinese New Year holidays, which means that our Chinese warehouse that we use for international shipping will be closed until Feb 1st. This only affects orders directly from our international webstore, eBay or Aliexpress. It does not affect orders from Amazon USA.

We expect our international store to transition over to the black dongles around February as well. 

Thanks to all our customers and blog readers for your support over the years! We have a few new exciting products currently being prototyped, so if you are not already, please remember to follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook for product updates, as well as for our weekly blog posts.