First results with the £13 SDR
The digital TV card arrived yesterday and of course, I couldn’t resist getting it going straight away. I followed Richard, G4WFR’s instructions and all went very well. There was a slight issue getting the USB driver installed with ZADIG.EXE. The problem wasn’t the program but no doubt my VISTA laptop! Anyway, after an initial failure to install the driver, I rebooted the laptop, tried again and it all worked well.
The first experiments have just been using an internal antenna. However, I’ve been able to receive a number of Band II FM stations, some in stereo, my own transmissions on 70, 144 and 432MHz on a variety of modes as well as some aircraft on AM around 120MHz and weather stations in the 433MHz band.
What I need to do is to pop into Maplins, hopefully tomorrow lunchtime and grab some plugs to make up an adapter, so I can plug the various external antennas into the receiver. I’m hoping we’ll see some good results.
I have one of these (similar) cards and I’ve successfully played a bit with it using a number of programs (Winrad, SDRADIO) but I’ve beat my head against the wall trying to get GNURadio to “see” and use the card under XP.
Maybe you’ll get there and conquer, catching something that I’m obviously missing!
73