Okay, first of all, I should mention that if you think you can use it for North American digital TV broadcasts - well, you couldn"t. North America is 100% ATSC (so get an ATSC tuner). DVB-T is the standard used by Europe, a chunk of Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and India. If you are from the US/Canada and bought one you are most likely NOT buying it for watching TV, you are using it for SDR (software defined radio) purposes. This device actually performs decently for SDR using your standard set of software (zadig/r, rtl-sdr, dump1080 with Debian Wheezy/Jessie/Scratch on an externally powered Beaglebone Black), and no, you don"t need drivers, there are plenty of writeups on how to get it working out there. There are some caveats:
a) It"s not that sensitive to begin with, or rather, you"ll need a way to feed more power and use a custom antenna for whatever you are tuning onto - just remember that you"ll need an MCX male pigtail to connect it to a better antenna (You probably have one if you have an old Lucent Orinoco card)
b) It"s physically tiny so it heats up quicker
c) When it heats up the radio sensitivity suffers even more (I threw a RAM heat spreader on mine so it actually does okay)
It"s pretty cheap, so think of it as like your "burner" SDR dongle. When you get your experiences up you might find its sensitivity to be a bit lacking. Feel free to buy a replacement for it.
by: Kevin Kwan
a) It"s not that sensitive to begin with, or rather, you"ll need a way to feed more power and use a custom antenna for whatever you are tuning onto - just remember that you"ll need an MCX male pigtail to connect it to a better antenna (You probably have one if you have an old Lucent Orinoco card)
b) It"s physically tiny so it heats up quicker
c) When it heats up the radio sensitivity suffers even more (I threw a RAM heat spreader on mine so it actually does okay)
It"s pretty cheap, so think of it as like your "burner" SDR dongle. When you get your experiences up you might find its sensitivity to be a bit lacking. Feel free to buy a replacement for it.
by: Kevin Kwan
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