Nooelec NESDR Smart HF Bundle: 100kHz-1.7GHz Software Defined Radio Set for HF/UHF/VHF Including RTL-SDR, Assembled Ham It Up Upconverter, Balun, Adapters

This is a great piece of tech and I have barely scratched the surface in its capabilities. It was purchased to be able to listen to FT8 transmissions. In the future it will be used in many ways I can not imagine yet. Please note that a great deal of learning is needed to truly get this thing working how you need it too. Also the infinite levels of tweaking will kill a mere mortal. First off I would like to point out that after I purchased this I received an email from the seller outlining that the drivers are very important. Thank you to the seller! Follow their directions and it is pretty painless, as long as you are familiar with software installation. If not then Youtube is your friend. This is the first time a vender has warned me ahead of getting their product. The CubicSDR software that they ask you to use, I did not like, but it works. May be fine for you. So far I have settled on using AirSpy SDR, it pipes the audio to a Virtual Cable software and it then sends it to WSJT-X. Just search this on Youtube if you are interested. It seams to display everything I am wanting. Waiting on my cables to hook up my radio. Stinking covid... I watched a pile of video's and read what I could find before I got this. If there is a better one for the cost, I did not find it. There are more expensive ones that will transmit as well. Now I want to call out the guy that said you could use 75 ohm TV coax when you are listening only... Well if you tweak it for about 10 hours, sure you can hear something. Maybe even get some FT8 through it. But no you will not like it at all. I'm no rocket surgeon, but I can tell you what I see. The Ham It Up converter that I received requires a -125,000,000 Shift to be put into the SDR software. It is important, at least in AirSpy that the offset has comma's in it. Even though it shows dots in the menu. This was close to an hour of Googling. This guy does run hot! So far it has not given out. But I place it where it can get as much air as possible. Lessons I learned the hard way: Extend your USB cable before you use a length of cable between the SDR and your antenna. I found that if I had a 16 foot of "China Best RG-58u" in the mix, I received no signals that could be processed for FT8 and mostly noise. The cables and adapters just produced to much loss i guess? The connectors that I received are good. Use a meter to test the ones you get, just to be sure. Cables that you buy need tested as well. The antenna's that you get, make sure you know which one to use. Bigger is not always better. Look online for an antenna calculator and plug in the frequency you want to hear and it will give you the 1/4 wave length, then setup your antenna accordingly. Look up this kit on youtube and see how to configure the balun for longwire and dipole antennas. This is the only antenna that has worked for me. The others are for wave lengths I'm not interested in yet. One antenna will not do everything. I did try using this on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ and a Pi 4 2 gig and I found that the cpu was not enough to get rid of clipping in the audio. Pi's are great, but not for this in my mind. The software was running the cpu's at 100%. I now run it on a Windows 10, i7 . Nothing is lost and it runs at 20% cpu.

Packaged well, a fun and useful radio. Customer support was very good.

The build quality and finish is clean and professional, conveying confidence in the product. Installation and set-up (including software installation on a mac) was straightforward, problem-free and quick. There is a fairly comprehensive set of accessories included in the kit, though the user will need a USB cable to power the 'Ham it Up' module. It is also a good idea to get a short USB patch cable to avoid plugging the 'NESDR Smart' unit directly in to a USB socket (the USB-A to USB-C / thunderbolt 3 converter for a MacBook Pro is just the job). This reduces mechanical loads on the connection - the module is compact but quite heavy. The cubicSDR software is almost intuitive to run and the features that it provides (especially the spectral displays) are powerful assets for short-wave listening. Setting up for short-wave work with the frequency offset is easy, but it might be better clarified that there is an upper limit to the frequency range:To go to the higher VHF/UHF ranges it is necessary not only to select 'passthrough', but also to set the frequency offset to zero. And finally, the provided antennas perform very well, even indoors. I find that the simple telescopic antenna performs just about as well as a 10m long wire hung outdoors.

This is a great technical hobby, and this is an inexpensive way to get into it! There's lots of excellent free and open source software available no matter what computer you hook it up to. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you get going with it there are lots of things you can do with it.

No issues, have controlled this from both a Raspberry Pi and a NUC. Depending on what you are doing, I would recommend going with something beefier than a Raspberry Pi. The SDR is solidly built.

This is a great starter kit. The first receiver dongle was intermittent, which resulted in a replacement being sent quickly. Since then, I bought a second RTL-SDR dongle. And neither the replacement or new one has given me the first problem. I'm buying a second up converter shortly. Be sure you install the driver EXACTLY as instructed. NOTE ON SPURS: Not all SDR software allows this receiver to perform at its peak. Too many programs run AGC much too high - it makes things seem more sensitive, but this causes overloading, and stations showing up everywhere. Receive quality almost rivals some of my "Big Name" ham radio gear under many circumstances.....rivals, but not exceeding.... I use the SDR receiver on a laptop with Windows 10, as well as a Motorola Z2 Play and Samsung Tab 4 via OTG adapter cables so the dongle can receive power from a LiION battery which powers the up converter as well. The dongle will definitely get quite warm, this is completely normal!

This is my experience-yours might vary. I would give this package of mismatched devices 0 Stars. It does not work out of the box. There is no plug and play with it. It is a USB dongle with a HAM it up box with it- for what, I don’t know… does it do something, its unexplained. There is no manual, no instructions , no step by step do this, No software included to load into the computer- NOTHING! I have been around computers my whole life. I loaded SDR++ and other software programs that supposedly work with Nooelec Smart/ Ham it up. None of it works! I did hours of troubleshooting and reading BS on the internet and I even went to Nooelec website-no help and nothing to help. So beware. My observation/my experience- I bought a bag of something, but what?? It did not work for me. Maybe, if you can devine the secrets to the Universe or actually build HF Radios from thin air, but for the rest of us, think twice! This was my experIence. Good luck to you! If you want a workable radio that works thru all of the bands AM thru HAM or Satellite, you are going to have to spend the big bucks. Don’t waste your time and money on cheap non working parts, pieces of scrap that won’t load into any software program and won’t make a pop or static noise of any kind. By the way, I contacted Nooelec. They referred me to a youtube video THAT DIDN’T HELP! Again, maybe your experience will vary and maybe you’ll be lucky. For me, I’m saving my pennies to buy a REAL RADIO that works! I’m done wasting my time with junk ( my opinion of course).

There is NO directions / setup instructions or recommended software for the device to work, quality of build is great but even a link to required software and installation would make this a 5 star