I finally got round to installing my new RTL 2832 (E4000) dongle today. Well, it was 'new' about four months ago but I didn't want to risk upsetting the smooth operation of RDS Spy during the Es season, so I decided to wait until it was all over. But I am sure many people in the UK would agree that this year's Es season is probably far from over! Even at the end of August there are still days of strong and sustained band-wide Es openings.
With a DX trip looming I decided I needed to take action and get this thing working. Amazingly, the installation completed in less than a minute. This is indeed unexpected as the last RTL dongle I installed took many days of trying and failing. That was the FC01 variant. That one was a poor performer though. The gain was poor and there was evidence of overload, though the use of different software applications improved some of the issues to a degree. Knowing that each RTL dongle performed differently gave me some reassurance. What if I had got a bad one? Since they are so cheap to order from online resources such as eBay and Amazon I decided to buy another.
This E4000 variant performs like a dream. There is no overload and the gain is more than adequate. It 'seems' to perform as well as my XDR-F1HD though I haven't done a side-by-side comparison. It's 'very close' at the very least. Whether the E4000 is simply a better performer than the FC01 I have no idea. They will probably all vary no matter which model you choose, but at only a few £s each you don't have much to lose. Buy a few and choose the best one because, if you get a good one of these, you have a very capable DX machine for very little money!
I love being able to tune between the 10kHz steps and slide the IF bandwidth in and out to suit. Digging in between stronger signals becomes easy. You can see all the weak signals on the waterfall scale even though they are just below audio level. I love how easy it is to record a chunk of IF bandwidth too- something which used to drain the resources of the laptop when using the FC01 dongle. That's not a problem anymore. My laptop is only has a simple Celeron mobile chip too and so won't be able to handle too much and it didn't seem keen to run SDR Console v2 smoothly, which needs a lot more processing power. I need to check my settings in case I have something wrong, but SDR# works perfectly for now.
In the future I will experiment with HD-SDR and RDS Spy *IF* my laptop can handle the necessary 192 kHz sampling rate.
The future of FM DXing is looking much brighter with the introduction of these dongles. I wonder what is around the corner?
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