Surprise Radio: RTL-SDR Blog V4 SDR

See warning at the end of the post.

I’ve had an RTL-SDR Blog V3 SDR for a few years, but I haven’t blogged much about it beyond the article on SSB. In the intervening years, RTL-SDR Blog has come out with V4 of the dongle, a software defined radio device that one might misidentify as a USB flash drive except for the SMA antenna jack.

It’s really an amazing device, covering from 500 kHz up 1.766 GHz. With software, it supports SSB, FM RDS and digital noise reduction.

I decided on the SDR Sharp (SDR#) software to run on my tablet PC back with the V3 dongle and continued with it for V4. Installation is a bit complicated, requiring multiple items to be installed. All I can say is read the instructions carefully and follow exactly. It went smoothly this time, compared to a real mess with the old one.

There is a long list of improvements for V4, detailed on the product data sheet. Notable are improved sensitivity and notch filters to reduce strong broadcast band interference.

I got through the software installation and hooked it up briefly to my new 40-foot outdoor antenna. I got some stations, including a very weak one from Radio France on 21580 MHz. I compared the signal with my Qodosen DX-286 and boosting the gain on the dongle allowed it to surpass the DX-286. It got my attention.

As time permits I’ll post some videos and experiences.

Update:

I installed SDRSharp on my desktop computer and the SDR works there too. I never thought I’d get anything amid all the RF noise, but it’s good.

Warning:

The device drivers provided for the RTL-SDR V4 (and likely V3) are incompatible with Windows 11.

The SDR will work, but the drivers create two significant problems for Windows.

1. Windows Security cannot implement Core isolation Memory integrity, for more on the importance of this feature, refer to the Microsoft Support discussion. With the RTL-SDR drivers installed you will see a warning and if you attempt to turn on Memory integrity, there will be an error message referring to a list of incompatible drivers. Specifically the errant ones are:
   
   RTL2832U.sys
   RTL2832UBDA.sys
   
   The are quite old, dating back to 2009 and 2o1o. That’s the days of Windows 7.
   
2. At least on my machine Windows Update will fail installing the 24H2 feature update. It will give error code 0xc1900101 – 0x40017, usually indicating a driver problem.