V4 R828D RTL2832U 1PPM TCXO SMA Software Defined Radio (Dongle Only)

Fantastic for the price. I got one of the first SDR Play RSPdx boxes and was completely disappointed. The hardware seems like it could be good but the software is an unusable mess, and getting all the switching and filtering to work with other software never worked. After being frustrated with endless trouble tickets and support that clearly didn't have a clue, I gave up. I had a buyer for the SDR Play on craigs but at the end of the day I wouldn't have been able to sleep after selling him that useless piece of garbage. Fast forward to the RTL-SDR V3 with a HamItUp. Worked a lot better than the SDR Play (what doesn't?) but it was noisy and switching it on and off and turning on the offset in the software was a pain. I ordered the RTL-SDR V4 the moment I first saw it and I am impressed. It works (unlike the SDR Play, which isn't even a good paperweight), it's several dB quieter than the HamItUp and there is no offset to deal with. This is a real winner, and at the price it's a bargain. I have a couple of V4 in the USB-C version on order and can't wait to get them.

Working great so far although its not exactly "plug and play" (which I expected) .. I'm using a Pi3 with the PI-SDR image. Works great with SDR++ on the image. The one issue I'm having is not being able to pickup AM broadcast bands. I suspect thats antenna related but not sure yet. This has been fun to play around with. Not allot going in my area with uv- vf so cant comment on that yet. I have a MLA-30+ antenna coming soon. Will update here more after that. I can say its definitely an improvement over ver 3 just because of the increased coverage. Looking forward to installing on a android tablet .Update - works great. Overall .. these are cludgy to use compared to a dedicated radio, but fun and allow you to learn and experiment with several spectrums of RF. I was finally able to get AM but ended up installing and using on a Win11 machine. You will probably want to set up multiple antennas to use with one of these. The MLA 30+ works great on HF and lower bands but truly doesnt perform well at all above 30 MHz (expected). For that I'm going to try a simple setup with a DPDT switch and use a long wire (by long I mean about 15 feet strung along the floor). The ability to go lower in the bands makes this a worthwhile purchase. I never went the route of the upconverter before because of the added cost and hassle . Plenty to experiment with and learn. Now that I feel like I have the antenna situation addressed and have a baseline I can start tweaking the software and bookmarking stations. Nice to have good sounding stereo FM radio available on my PC setup as well. I still have a couple things I want to try - like going portable in the camper, completing a comparison of SD# and SD++, things like that. This thing will keep me busy for a while.

So much better than previous iterations. I've got this hooked up to a random wire (speaker wire) antenna in an attic, using a 9:1 balun. I'm receiving stuff I never heard on the last versions of this SDR or cheaper ones. This is solid.

4 stars because I love what it can do. But it definitely has some things you should know before you buy.I use sdrtrunk with windows. I also have a le potato that I've tried it on, with trunkrecorder.The combo of this dongle and SDRtrunk for windows just will not work on my AMDs properly. Flaky and random bus errors. Doesn't matter if I'm using USB 2.0 or 3.x. Doesn't matter if I'm using a powered hub. Doesn't matter if I'm using different ports. Just consistently bad. I tried every combination possible, and every solution online. Big waste of time.But it works fabulously even on every intel - including a 15+ yr old one. Both windows 10 and windows 11. BUT with one big caveat - Windows updates change the driver periodically UGH. When this happens, you have to manually use Zadig software to reinstall it - and it's not the most intuitive process, especially if you have multiple dongles. And you don't know it's a problem until you see that the tuners are showing just error messages. So I've resorted to pausing Windows updates for 30 days at a time, and then just doing them manually.I have 3 dongles (two v4 and one v3) hooked up to a USB 3 powered hub, uploading to both broadcastify and openmhz. It just works!One other caveat - if you get two dongles of the same version, for some programs you will need to use separate software to go in and change the ID number of one. Otherwise it gets confused. No problems once I did this step.On the le potato they just worked right out of the box.Highly recommend if you are looking for a cheap ems/fire/police scanner for nonencrypted areas.But you DO need someone who knows what they're doing helping you to get the software setup. Even getting advice on places like radio reference isn't quite enough if you're getting into this from scratch. But I love having this now that I've had a few months to play with it and enjoy!

Listen to just about anything out there. These little thing are awesome. I use them to decode P-25 with SDR-trunk and to listen to aviation traffic on SDR Sharp.

Installation can be a PITA but there are videos and instructions online.Once you're up and running, you'll be blown away by what you can pick up with even a modest antenna.