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| Nice design. How does the entry-level version of Elad SDR compare, at £500, against a £37 dingle-type SDR? |
I've been thinking about one of those FunCube or Watson dongles for a couple of years. But the price of about £100 - £150 was putting me off.
A quick search online revealed SDR receivers on Amazon and Ebay going for about £37. That's more like it, and all-too-typical of take-the-ham-for-a-ride pricing when buying from specialist outlets.
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| Generic, China-made SDR dongle/box type. Just £37! |
Freeware is readily available for these dongle type receivers, and from all accounts, there should be very little I won't be able to hear for £37 that my mate paid £500 for his Elad. In fact, according to one seemingly objective test, the Elad was trailing behind the cheap dongles on occasion!
Having played with the box of tricks for a day or so, I have to say the installation was absolutely infuriating! This is because it needs a driver that, as I later found out, comes within the Zadig library with SDR Sharp, the software most commonly used with these units.
A number of YouTube videos of this apparently exact-same box tell you to use sampling modes other than quadrature. In fact, quadrature sampling was exactly what my box needs, and having selected this within SDR Sharp and then adjusted the bandwidth to 120000 on wideband FM (or just 10000 on AM), I suddenly found everything was working perfectly.
Apparently, a different driver is needed to access the HF bands, making this box much more cumbersome to use than initially meets the eye. All the same, at VHF, I was amazed to find that, using just a simple dipole cut to the airband frequencies, I was picking up not only the aircraft but the regional controllers on the ground as well - in some cases a couple of hundred miles away, at least. I never remember achieving that with any of my old scanners.
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