Nooelec RTL-SDR v5 Bundle - NESDR SMArt HF/VHF/UHF (100kHz-1.75GHz) Software Defined Radio. Premium RTLSDR w/ 0.5PPM TCXO, SMA Input, Aluminum Enclosure & 3 Antennas. RTL2832U & R820T2-Based Radio

Great little kit, performs well.I've noticed a few software glitches, e.g. if you sit on a specific frequency for too long you'll have to restart the process again to retune further.Gets quite hot but hasn't failed so far. The magnet isn't stuck onto the stand very well so I have to fully extend the antenna to weigh it down.Probably not a great first impression to new users, the drivers have to be manually installed using external software, and there's no help provided directly by NESDR as far as I'm aware (this may be inaccurate).Otherwise brilliant, a great product considering the price.

Excellent piece of kit. Needed it to test if some vehicle key fobs (which dont have replaceable batteries) were emitting a signal after the central locking stopped working. Worked a treat with free Android software.

A really fun kit which I have been using to learn about radio. I currently use this on linux, which worked without installing any additional drivers. My only negative is on the antenna stand magnet is very weak, and tips over very easily.

This comes with a USB extension lead (with ferrite core) so you don't need to buy this an extra. All you have to do is download and run the software to get it going. To save you what took me a day to sort out go straight to airspy.com/download/ and download SDR#. Next INSTALL RTLSDR, this will put the ZANDIG file in the same directory. Use ZANDIG to load the correct drivers for the dongle. NOW run RTLSDR and you should very quickly be able to load up an FM radio channel and listen to some music. I started off using HDSDR software and got nowhere when it came to listening in to an FM radio channel - probably me - but SDR# was just way quicker and way simpler to use. Enjoy!!!

The item itself works well or certainly as expected with a reasonable learning curve with the software side, so no complaints on the item itself.However, I paid extra for the option with the 3 antenna's for which were much smaller than expected when they arrived. In fact at first I thought I had a faulty item as I was picking up nothing except some rather poor sounding FM broadcast radio stations. Tweaking or repositioning the antenna helps with radio stations but even when I got to grips with the software it soon became obvious and confirmed via research and third party people that the 3 desktop mini antennas are at best of very limited use and next to unless in a lot of locations. Of cause I'm not expecting to pick up transmissions from 50-200 miles + away eith a desktop antenna, but im struggling to pick up much at all outside of broadcast radio stations and it would certainly have been reasonable to have expected to pick-up something even with these small antennas in the suburbs of a major city with loads of retail locations within 2 miles of my location.This item description should be made clear of the reception limitations of the included antenna's. Had I realised the 3 antenna's were just to limiting I'd not gave took that option and instead put the extra money to a decent desktop antenna instead.

The NESDR SMArt v5 Bundle comes with 3 aerials, short one is for UHF ( suitable for 500MHz - 1900MHz), the mid size for 70cm (400MHz - 470MHz) and telescopic aerial can be adjusted to the desired frequency.If you know the frequency range you want to tune in, you can achieve very good results by using telescopic aearial and any online Vertical Antenna Calculator.I have used this SDR mainly for Weather Baloon Radiosonde Tracking with Raspberry Pi4 2GB and software from SQ6KXY.Over the weeks I have tested it with Mac and many different flavours of Linux on a X86_32, X86_64 and ARM 32bit and 64bit (Raspberry Pi) platforms. Each and every time SDR was recognised without any issues.My unit has been in 24/7 operation for for several weeks now, while it gets fairly worm, it works reliably.It can receive clear signal from radiosonde 200km away at 30,000m altitude with 1.5m diapole antenna. The digital signal is clear and received messages do not contain errors.I have tested it on most Amateur Radio bands too, and ADS-B for flight tracking all with great results.I can highly recommend NESDR SMArt v5 Bundle to any radio enthusiast. I will be ordering more of those SDR's for my RX project to be able to cover more frequency ranges at the same time.All the best

Device is constantly crashing on Windows machine and raspberry Pi. Will run for a bit then hear windows device removal...then get "Unknown descriptor" error. Then need to uninstall "unknown device descriptor device" then reseat the device. May get lucky and only have to do it once...but sometimes needs multiple tries. I had gave it a bit of a by-ball on the pi as a. its a pi (headless) and can be flaky b. have been tied up with a few other things and not used in a couple of weeks and c. I was using custom build drivers for RTL-SDR Blog V4 so was thinking they could be part of the issue. Nowhere near as stable as a RTL-Blog V4.Would avoid unless its literally all you can afford and willing to put up with these issues.