A Warning for R820T2 RTL-SDR Purchases on eBay/Aliexpress etc
Just a brief warning for those purchasing the generic dongles on eBay and Aliexpress. We’ve recently heard of a number of customers having ordered generic dongles advertised as having R820T or R820T2 chips, but receiving dongles with FC0012 chips inside instead.
The R820T2 is capable of tuning from around 24 MHz to 1766 MHz, whereas the FC0012 can only tune between 22 – 948 MHz. Compared, the R820T2 is definitely the better chip.
This scam is probably happening because the price of the FC0012 is less than the R820T/2. So these sellers may be trying to cut costs and simply hoping that no one will notice the chip change since both chips are RTL-SDR compatible in the drivers. You can check what tuner chip you have either with rtl_test, or simply by reading the markings on the chip itself.
In addition we have also recently seen several scammer bots on eBay pop up who are selling our own RTL-SDR Blog V3 dongles at very low prices. These sellers are typically automated bots that mass copy popular listings, and undercut their price hoping to grab a few fake sales before disappearing. They usually have zero feedback, or a small amount of feedback from purchases made from the account, and they price the product extremely low, typically even below the manufacturing cost. Most likely you will never see a product from them and they will simply disappear from eBay after a few days. This has already happened to one scam seller that we have been tracking, although before they disappeared they had already made 80+ fake sales.
I have a genuine v3 with dipole etc and on HF on an end fed it is useless and on a cobweb with ferrites it is just tolerable.
Compared to andrus sdr mk 1.5 an old device.
Couldn’t say hf performance impressed me unless mine is faulty.
The included dipole antenna is only for VHF and UHF, it’s not sized for HF and will perform poorly on HF as expected. If you’re interested in HF, you will need to provide your own appropriately sized or HF tuned antenna.
An end fed
40-10 it was dreadful and a cobweb that regularly I speak to USA on 20m, the v3 dongle after hours of trying various things was still dreadful on HF.
If you had read my comment correctly on an end fed 10-40m and a cobweb at 12m.
Perfectly aware the telescopic aerial not hf.
The V3 genuine dongle was dreadful.
Following the guides and setting it up-hours and ferrites to get any HF reception.
Which is odd as s1 noise on icom 7300 and Andrus MK1. 5 sdr.
Concluded that great for VHF and UHF and completely useless in my application on HF.
Leaning to it may just about do HF, but either the dongle is faulty or overrated marketing for HF
If you had read my comment correctly on an end fed 10-40m and a cobweb at 12m.
Perfectly aware the telescopic aerial not hf.
The V3 genuine dongle was dreadful.
Following the guides and setting it up-hours and ferrites to get any HF reception.
Which is odd as s1 noise on icom 7300 and Andrus MK1. 5 sdr.
Concluded that great for VHF and UHF and completely useless in my application on HF.
Leaning to it may just about do HF, but either the dongle is faulty or overrated marketing for HF
Didn’t do my research, bought a piece of shit clone sdr. Ordered a propper one now from a legitimate seller. Hopefully i can get that going. Seems verry complex to get installed. Will try again when the legitimate device arrives.
Even though its supposed to have the RTL-2832U, can only get it partially working by selecting funcube device in air spy, otherwise no way it works. A real heap. Should have read the feedback before buying but have had bad experiences with feedback on eBay and found ti was rigged allowing sellers to remove negative feedback. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/175079392099
did anyone notice that that FC0012 is able to scan above 1.7G upto 2G for some unknown reason using Kalibrate. SDR Sharp shows activity on this range however I was unable to get gr-gsm to work for the detected frequencies. Could it be due to the max sampling rate which does not seem to be enough (2M)?
It has happened to me though, although I was able to get a refund of 70%, and it still works for TV. So not so bad deal.
If we don’t care about the extended frequency range, is it still a loss? How do these chips compare to the ‘real deal’ as far as SNR/dynamic range go?
They still work, and if you’re not interested in anything over 958 MHz you’re fine. Not sure on the performance, but they should be similar.
Oh, no, performance is horrible. No gain setting(well, there is, but it doesn’t change anything), it looks like basically +49 gain always, overload everywhere. Even though if the signal is not overloaded it decodes bad compared to the R820T2. I tried WFM(also other signals) and it hears like if you put a speaker on maximum, distorsion. Get rid of them unless you want to watch TV, which they work fine.
Dongle Made in China z R820T/T2 sprawdzam po otwarciu plastikowej obudowy czy jest IC R820T/T2 lub Rafaelo R820T
There is one quote that fits this bill perfectly:
If it is to good to be true, it probably is!
I see this a lot on CPUs too, the prices are insanely low and the sellers have 0 transactions
They were doing that with USB memory sticks about 15 years ago. If you bought a 4 GB stick for the price of a 2 GB stick it was actually a 2 GB stick with a hacked filesystem so it looked like 4 gig to the computer. But if you wrote more than 2 GB it’d start overwriting your previous data.
They are still doing it http://www.ebay.com/itm/272611769199 ; sometimes i buy an get the refund after i show evidence that h2testw recognized it as a fake; the 32Gb are actually 4Gb and they are good for daily use 😀