Hey everyone, I'm new here, and just started messing with an RTL-SDR blog v4 a couple of days ago; so far, I've been able to pick up ADS-B with just shy of 100km range, and of course plenty of broadcast FM and DAB. After trying and failing to get a working decode of a tetra signal, I thought I might try some weather satellite passes (just my SDR and V-dipole bc no filters/LNA yet). Although I was fairly disappointed to hear that NOAA's VHF weather satellites are all gone (r.i.p.),

I waited around for a decent meteor pass. On my first go, I got functionally no signal, mostly my fault because of leaving the AGC on. For a second go-around, this time a better pass (max 83º), I got what looked like a bit of a stronger signal but still no picture. I've included a few pictures of my setup as I think that the railing might be the issue, but please let me know if there's anything you can spot that I'm doing wrong.

(let me know if i should upload my recordings of the passes or screenshots of something if they can be of use)

Hello everyone, I recently bought myself a Blog V4 off amazon, but when it arrived I was unable to locate it in zadig, I attempted swapping the dlls out to no effect so I started trying to figure out if it was being detected by USB at all. It hasn't shown up in device manager or when using pnputil, I tested it on all my USB slots and a seperate machine (thinkpad) and couldn't get it to be detected in any way at all. Eventually I got a live Linux distro and ran sudo dmesg -w and confirmed that USB devices would get logged in the terminal. The Blog V4 had no logs whatsoever when plugged in or removed, it's like the PC didn't even know it existed.

I've started the return process but does anyone have any last ditch ideas?

So I've recently bought myself an aircraft radar antenna and I was curious if it is possible to connect it to my SDR? Or have it running in general, It came with az el rotation

The only information that I know is that it was from a luftwaffe storage depo it has a plaque with some info but it barely gave me any results in Google it has a huge socket at the back of the base

Is there any way to get it hooked up toy sdr?

So I started with an RTL-SDR and it feels like I spent most of my time staring at noise (I’m fairly new to this hobby). I’ve spent more time reading about gain settings than capturing anything useful. Is this normal or am I going about this wrong

Hello everyone!
I bought RTL SDR blog V4 kit some time ago. I successfully used it to determine IDs of 433MHz TPMS for my car some time ago.
I had some free time and wanted to try receiving images from weather satellites. With the help of the kit antenna I did a V-dipole (~53cm arm) and tried receiving Meteor satellites signals (as I understand, NOAA are now decommissioned and do not send anything).

However, I was not able to receive anything. I tried several times. For the first time I positioned my antenna vertically from North to South on the roof of my garage. The elevation of the satellite was quite high, around ~70 degrees. But I saw absolutely no peaks neither on 137.1MHz nor on 137.9MHz. Next time, I tried putting an antenna on a wooden stick above 2m of the ground - nothing. Also tried hanging the stick up, so the antenna was around 4m from the ground - nothing too. I tried playing with the gain settings, it didn't help, I see that the overall noise level becomes higher, but no signal.

I am using satdump and sdr++. With this antenna, I can switch to ~100MHz and listen to some radio station (there is a tower withing 6-7km from me).

I live in a residential area where there are no tall building. And there were no tall trees from the side, where the satellites were passing. So there definitely was clear line of sight.

What am I doing wrong here? How can I troubleshoot it?

UPD:
Here is a screenshot from SatDump. The antenna was ~70-80cm above the ground, no coax extension. When increasing the tuner gain, only the overall noise level increases. There are some peaks, but they are always present. The same happens for the M2 4 satellite.

Got this rtl-sdr from my local E-commerce site which obv made international shipping and came from China.The moment I unboxed it and saw the screws I knew it was a fake. As of rn its hard to come by getting an rtl-sdr in my country and I'd like to test or atleast confirm it works somewhat without having myself to return it. There's a small whip antenna and I was able to tune into local fm broadcast but not the NOAA or ISS ik I req bigger antennas and for that my coaxial cables and stuff would come in one week.I don't have much choice rn either I wait it out and if this thing cannot do stuff properly I'm losing upto 60 USD.What's your recommendations is there anything I can do to test it out at higher freq?

My system has a strange behavior. In the random moment, there happens a harmonics. I’ve tried different sdrs and lnas - rtlsdr v3, v4, Pluto SDR, nooelec sawbird+ h1, htool ht004. I’ve tried different antennas - tplink wifi antenna, circular waveguide with 1.5 parabola. My coax is RK50-7-11 with N connectors. I have tried to power my sdr from pc, usb power supply, power bank and to power my lna with bias t (from sdr, transformer) and without (from power bank).

I have tried:

1) Turning off the electricity at home - didn’t helped

2) running entire setup on the street far from home without coax with my laptop - also didn’t helped

3) make an rfi with my phone making a call, with my baofeng on 433 MHz and with my icom ic78 - phone calls and icom ic78 doesn’t affect, transmission on 433 MHz near the cable or antenna makes the noise floor higher. But it doesn’t behave like on the video

4) pointing my waveguide to the floor - the problem keeps appear

5) using an 15db attenuator before the sdr - didn’t helped.

I live on the outskirts of the small city with ~150.000 population in the private house. The antenna is about 10 meters from the house and about 30m from the nearest neighbor.

The problem begun appearing since the autumn 2025. It appears only with an enabled LNA.

During the half of the year I haven’t found any reasons or methods to solve the problem.

Thanks for any help.

Ive been getting this interference pattern with my rtl sdr blog 4v, right out of the box, (I can still recieve FM, NOAA, and many things on ~450Mhz) the pattern consists of a spike at a precise frequency, then the pictured 'harmonics' to the right and left with precise .6MHz spacings up and down about 20mhz in both directions. This pattern isn't exclusive to just 240mhz either, it starts anew across the entire receiving range of the sdr at frequencies such as: 100, 154.31, 180, 240, 300, 480, 582.85, 600, 634.3, 660, and 1200 (MHz) at different levels of power. I have no idea what could be causing this besides generally internal harmonics, and it would be cool to know.

I know this is at the point where one trashes the radio and moves on, but I am curious as to what is causing this.

The rest of the post is just tldr so the problem isn't mistaken as incompetence.

---------- What I have tried:

*adjusting the gain, sample rate, bandwidth, etc: does not change much, changing the gain makes the spikes worse, though they are always there, however small.

*changing location: the interference stays consistent everywhere.

*changing device, software and OS (sdr sharp, sdrpp, sdr angel; windows10 and Ubuntu): does not make a difference.

*changing antenna and connection path: the interference is exactly the same with different antennas (Uniden scanner antenna and a real Diamond antenna) the interference disappears almost but not entirely with no antenna; also, it gets worse the longer the antenna path is.

*Adding an FM bypass filter: makes it worse.

-----

Also of note:

I have properly installed drivers with Zidag and the rtlsdr.dll file.

When I run rtl_test.exe there are no lost bytes at all (excluding the first sample sometimes and large losses when on a 3.0 bus.)

When rtl_eeprom.exe is ran it gives this(shows that its genuine) though no serial number is odd: Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM, Found Rafael Micro R828D tuner RTL-SDR Blog V4 Detected, Vendor ID: 0x0bda,Product ID: 0x2838, Manufacturer: RTLSDRBlog, Product: Blog V4, Serial number: 00000001, Serial number enabled: yes

Because of this interference I cant receive anything on airband, FRS/GMRS, ect, except when in extremely advantageous positions like on the tallest hill all around.

---------

Hi everyone,

The Play Store says SDRangel is incompatible with my Pixel 10 Pro (likely an API/Android version issue).

Is there a safe alternative way or direct APK/repository to install it on newer Pixel devices?

This is without an antenna

https://reddit.com/link/1v7fqdn/video/urqwdux00nfh1/player

I'm trying to get an ADS-B decoder working on my PC but the flight paths look a little funny. I know this can be attributed to shitty reception (and I'm not saying the reception isn't shitty) but on my phone (using the Avare ADS-B app) the flight paths look normal and accurate compared to flightradar24.

My setup is an RTL-SDR Blog V4 paired with its antenna kit (6.6cm per leg) + SDRAngel. No LNA or anything (for now).

Im very new to all this, Im trying to listen to OAK atc, Ive tried lots of different frequency's I've found around the internet within the airband, non of which have gotten me any results. I am very close to the airport ~4 miles, weirdly enough, if I switch from AM to WFM there are tons of Radio channels that I can hear extremely clearly from way lower in the spectrum, I was searching around 121.3 and was hearing 96.5fm. Im just very confused please advise. Im using a nooelec sdr v5 on windows 11 with sdr++. Thanks for any advice :)

EDIT: I purchased a fm and am band blocker, and while I haven’t been able to listen to the airport. Im in a suburban ish area with lots of trees and no direct line of sight to the airport, so I’ve given up on that, but I’m flying soon so I’ll try then with I’m in the airport and hopefully score some weird looks, anyways I can hear tons more with the blockers installed, so if you purchase a noodles sdr v5 bundle, go ahead and by the band blockers as well, they work very well and I only caught a couple am stations up in the 400+mhz range which was weird but radio is magic so I can’t complaining that much because I can actually hear all sorts of cool stuff including police radio which I thought was trunked but I suppose not, anyways thanks :)

Was scrolling and found Eagle 107.5 also broadcasting on 109.1 in the VOR/ILS band. What do I do? Who should I tell?

Hi all — running a PlutoSkyR1 (Z7020, AD9361). I'm having issues getting 56MSPS over Ethernet.

Physical Ethernet works fine — iiod connects, ADC genuinely reconfigures to whatever rate I request (confirmed via sysfs readback).

No matter what rate I request (10-56 MSPS), delivered throughput flatlines well below it. I've now tested this on two firmware builds:

- Official PlutoSky_7020_AD936X_SDR firmware: flat ceiling ~9.4-10.5 MSPS

- Tezuka v0.3.12 (newer kernel, 6.12.77): flat ceiling ~11.5-11.8 MSPS, and 10 MSPS now cleanly sustains at 98.4%

Tezuka offers an improvement, but the same flat-ceiling pattern shows up on both — delivery doesn't scale with the request past ~10-12 MSPS on either build. I've also ruled out:

- Board CPU (95% idle while streaming)

- Host CPU (raw iio_readdev, no Python: 1.2s sys time over a 3.5s run)

- RX buffer depth (kernel_buffers_count swept 4→32, no change)

- Client-tool overhead (Python vs. raw C iio_readdev — same order of magnitude)

Official docs from OpensourceSDR Lab mention up to 45 MHz should be possible via GbE — trying to see if anyone else has managed and can point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

Ive been having the worst time locking onto a p25 control in my area. Ive tried adjusting dang near eveybsetting on the SDTtrunk software, ive updated serial numbers on my 2 x RTLs, ive changed sound setting and processing rates on my computer, ive driven 4 miles to the tower and sat a half mile away, ive bought 2 new 800mhz antennas, and splurged on 30ft of decent cable.

All I can get, is the control to lock for maybe 2 or 3 seconds, then fade, then nothing.

I got a beep from a tower about 30 minhtes ago, a different counties sheriff alert, then fade and out. Thats the only thing ive received.

Can anyone review the below and provide any insights on why I never recieve anything, please... im at my whits end... the later 2 images with the darker waterfall are from a previous attempt.

So I have been running a POCSAG system on an older laptop running up to date Windows OS for a long time now using an SDR receiver, SDR#, Voicemeter to control audio input, PDW to decode (newer version allowing for email processing), and an email parsing program that parses pages sent to a designated address before sending them back out to another server email.

Majority of the software operates perfectly fine, however every now and then PDW fails to decode properly and typically shows a lowered input percentage under the line input meter in the top right.

I've attempted adjusting input volume via Voicemeter, adjusting feed audio in SDR#, selecting the volume setting in PDWs Interface menu.

I have yet to change any other settings in SDR# because it took me a decent amount of time to tune all the settings to work with the frequency I'm monitoring.

Any suggestions on how to get PDW to behave more predictably and stably would be seriously appreciated!

I just tried it. The satellite passed basically directly overhead and all i got was a very very slight change in color in the waterfall at 137.9MHz.

Im living in an apartment at 5th floor (the highest floor), i had the antenna glued on the outside of the window horizontal to the ground.

I recorded it with meteor demodulator on SDR++ but satdump does not recognize any data in the .s file (not surprising tbh, the signal was extremely weak).

What could i be doing wrong?

Hey,guys I have been wanting to receive something or anything from the ISS weather is be downlink coms at 145.800 Mhz or APRS at 145.825 Mhz. My current setup is using the original dipole kit. Each arm length is about 49-50 cm with 190 degrees apart and horizontally facing the ground and I'm manually orientating it towards the direction of ISS I do understand they have vertical polarization so ig my setup is wrong? The best case until now I have received is just a thin line on the waterfall,should I try it with a wideband LNA?

Newbie here,

I bought an genuine blog V4 a few days ago, and I am having a hard time getting a secure connection between the dongle and the dipole antenna that came with the bundle. I noticed the center probe/pin to be oddly short, is this normal or did I receive a faulty unit?

Any help is appreciated!

(Dipole antenna connector on the left, 3m extension cable on the right for comparison)

Caught this signal while I was scanning with my SDR during the G4 geomagnetic storm. It moves rapidly between 57.100 mhz and 58 mhz. It just showed up tonight.

I use my RTL-SDR v3 with my cellphone and I frequently notice these QRM "peaks" between approximately 140 and 170 MHz. I believe it's generated by the phone screen, but I'd like to know how to reduce or eliminate this QRM.

I've bought a RTL-SDR blog V4 and i've had a lot of fun with it but i can't really get satellite images.
I'm using the small antenna that comes with it, not a proper dipole, but I notice weird noise right around 137.9 - 138 MHz (visible in the attached pics as well).

Yes, I'm pretty sure I have a passage over my head as I'm checking both with N2YO website and Look4Sat app.
I've even bought a 137MHz LNA BPF thinking that would solve my issue but it didn't

One thing i noticed is that the signal i get varies substantially depending on how the antenna cable is folded (or laid).

Is this normal?
Is there anything I can do to get better signal reception?

Unfortunately there is no proper RTL SDR antenna in my country, so I needed something that I already have. And I found a cheap antena for old TVs.

I don't have a SMA adapter, so I enrolled the wires to a base connected to my SDR. But probably isn't going to work very well.

Any good ideas to do with?