RTLSDR4Everyone: Preliminary Review of the ThumbNet N3 Prototype

A few weeks ago we posted about ThumbNets announcement of their new N3 RTL-SDR dongles. The main theme of their new dongles is lower noise as can be seen by their decision to disable the on board switch mode power supply and add an external power port for powering the dongle from a clean power supply.

Akos from the RTLSDR4Everyone blog received a prototype sample of the N3 for an initial review. In his review he shows some close up shots of the N3 PCB, and does a quick test on receiving some signals. His screenshots show that the noise floor is indeed very low, and that many noisy spurs are eliminated or at least significantly reduced.

Once ThumbNet release their actual commercial units we intend to produce our own review as well.

ThumbSat is a company hoping to enable experimenters to get low cost mini satellites into orbit for about $20k. To support the need for global RX of these satellites they have the ThumbNet project which utilizes RTL-SDR dongles as the receiver. They aim to provide schools and eligible volunteers around the world with free RX hardware to receive and record the data coming from these satellites.