SDR Dongle Internal Preamp
Added by Jeremy Wright about 9 years ago
I'm a little late to the game on this project, so please forgive me if I'm covering something obvious here.
I grabbed Ground Sphere's SDR dongle from Amazon when it was $8, and decided to give it a try today. I posted a News/Dev Log item about getting the dongle working with SDR# in Linux. What I think I'm seeing is that SDR# uses the rtl-sdr library to manipulate the dongle's gain. In the repo it looks like SeeDeR is using the rtl-sdr library too.
Tim and Scott - Are you using rtl-sdr directly in SeeDeR (sorry, I haven't looked through the source yet)? If so, are you already using it to adjust the gain on the dongle?
If SeeDeR is using rtl-sdr and not adjusting the gain yet, maybe we can start a discussion about whether or not it's practical to use the dongle's internal 50dB amp in place of the external 20dB preamp. Aaron has mentioned that the internal will probably be more noisy, but if it works well enough it would cut the cost and complexity of the existing prototype considerably.
Thoughts?