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.

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

Well, this receiver is very nice for starters, especially the ones who never played with SDR based radios. So I've would rate this 5 out of 5 on this one. However, I've ran into issues with drivers, and the software, out of 5 softwares only one worked. Dont get me wrong, thats not a complain because it could be just misconfigured software( since I never got that far, because 1 software works well with -SDR# ). The radio itself is a bit noisy, but it's fixable if you have steady hands and a bit of SMD soldering experience in past. The casing itself looks solid, however, I would strongly suggest you to use SHIELDED USB extension coord, because radio itself is a bit too heavy for USB port, and it may damage your port. The antennas are Okay, possible to catch airplanes and airport with telescopic antenna , and 10 metres above sea floor. In general, considering price/reliability/performance, I've would give a strong 4/5.

SDR Radio for PC tablet and phone. Works better with outside aerial but comes with small magnetic aerial for mobile.

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.

Why did you choose this product over others?:Bought this to connect to a laptop and then receive AIS information into the OpenCPN software. I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to do this, and it was pretty straightforward. Managed to get it all working on AIRSPY, which was able to listen to radio signals, both commercial music stations and civil communications.Once installed on the laptop, I successfully got OpenCPN working.The software I used was detailed in the YouTube videos but it included rtlsdr_pi, Airspy, AIS-catcher and OpenCPN.