Saturday, December 29, 2012

Grounded

I hope all of you had a very good Christmas. I was not very well a couple of days before the holiday. Nothing to do with my cancer, I'm glad to say, but possibly a result of all the treatment for it. I'm feeling a lot better now, but have got to have more tests and may have to go into hospital for removal of gallstones or kidney stones - I'm not sure which as I've been told I have gallstones but I have had some sharp pain in the kidney area. As a consequence of this I haven't felt much like getting up at a reasonable hour to start the beacon monitor or HF APRS gateway.

Creative Design New FM+DAB USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T
Before Christmas my interest was piqued by Tim G4VXE's adventures using cheap digital TV dongles as receivers for, amongst other things, aircraft spotting. The first dongle I ordered was described as a Creative Design New FM+DAB USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T with antenna, and cost just over six quid!

EZCAP eztv645 RTL2832U / FC0013 USB DVB-T Digital TV Dongle
After a bit more reading up on the subject I began to doubt that this would be compatible with the software everyone was using so I ordered a second one, described as an EZCAP eztv645 RTL2832U / FC0013 USB DVB-T Digital TV Dongle for WIN7 LINUX SDR which was a massive £8.68 including postage from Hong Kong.

Both arrived yesterday. I tried the ezcap first, but my shack PC didn't like the mini-disc that came with it so I was unable to test it as a TV receiver. Following the instructions for the aircraft decoders I installed the driver using zadig_xp, then downloaded and ran rtl1090 which is a decoder for the ADSB packets. This seemed to work - no error messages appeared - but nothing else happened. To display the aircraft data that I hoped to receive I downloaded ADSBScope and installed it. I then spent a lot of time trying various options to connect ADSBScope with rtl1090 but got nowhere. I also tried SDRSharp in the hope that I could use the dongle as a VHF/UHF SDR, and ADSBSharp as an alterntive to rtl1090. But neither of them received anything.

After a while I gave up, disappointed. I then installed the Creative Design dongle and its software. A scan for channels found about 55 TV channels with its quarter wave antenna hung in the window. So it was obviously working. Just not with any of the SDR or ADSB software, as I had suspected.

This morning I tried installing the ezcap software CD that my shack PC couldn't read on another computer. The software installed perfectly on this laptop so I plugged in the dongle and hung the antenna in the window. The software scanned for channels and found precisely nothing. I think this proves conclusively that I have a duff ezcap dongle. Ah, eBay!
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5 comments:

  1. UnknownSaturday, December 29, 2012 5:57:00 pm

    Julian,
    I read the article " Cheap and easy SDR " by W9RAN and tried it out using a TERRATEC NOXON DAB USB stick.
    I used Zadig and SDRSharp as discribed in this article on a windows Xp SP2 PC.
    It worked first try. This rarely happens here..
    Vy interesting for listening to FM radio, repeaters , aircraft traffic etc .
    73 de ON5AO
    jo

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownSaturday, December 29, 2012 6:58:00 pm

    To start with stay away from any included software like for tv. The risk is that you get the those drivers installed on tnen having problrms getting the proper SDR ones installed.

    Try sdr sharp software and try to receive fm bc or 2m ham.

    Eric SA5BKE

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mike NewellSunday, December 30, 2012 4:55:00 pm

    Julian,
    How are you getting on with the CrossCountry SDR-4 ? I have been thinking about getting one but would like to hear from someone who has got one themselves.
    Cheers,
    Mike.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mikael - SA6BSSSunday, December 30, 2012 7:46:00 pm

    Hi, I have the RTL2832U+R820T
    dongel and it works great, here is links to my files that I´m using.

    W7-W8
    http://db.tt/QWizautl


    XP
    http://db.tt/EjUCZTfu

    install zadig driver as in this guide.
    http://rtlsdr.org/softwarewindows

    hopefully this will get you going, and dont forget to set the rf gain to about half under config in sdrsharp.

    73 - Mikael - SA6BSS

    ReplyDelete
  5. HansMonday, December 31, 2012 11:18:00 am

    Hello Julian,

    I have the same RTL Cube - DVB-T USB stick.
    On the site from van Dijken http://www.vandijkenelektronica.nl/ you see this dongle on the frontpage (rightside)and when you chose "meer informatie" (more information) you can download a file special for XP. It's 1 file with SharpSDR and Zadig included.
    I have download and instalted and it works fine.

    73 de Hans, PE1BVQ

    ReplyDelete