Noxon DAB Stick (RTL2832U + FC0013 tuner)

[JustAn Amateur]

In the Netherlands the MediaMarkt sells the NOXON DAB Stick for about €30,-. It uses the RTL2832U and FC0013 chipset.

My first impression after using this stick is not quite positive! The receiver is slightly deaf, even in the 70cm range with tuned groundplane antenna.
Furthermore it toke me quite some time to realise that using HPSDR and the driver aren't functioning well...
After a short time off tuning i'll have to reset the ExtIO_USRP.dll by CREATE in the special ExtIO-screen and hitting Start in HPSDR.

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The settings in ExtIO : Terratec Noxon (rev1) are:
Remote:          OFF
Device Hint:    RTL tuner=fc0013
samplerate:    1.000000
Antenna:        (default)
Offset (ON)     0
Gain/attenuation:   MAX 19.700

nothing further
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Of course i'm willing to testdrive this stick under your supervision,

Justan Amateur


Info on compatible hardware can be found over here:
http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr (shorter list)
http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/s6ddo/rtlsdr_compatibility_list_v2_work_in_progress/

[JustAn Amateur]

My first impression after using this stick is not quite positive! The receiver is slightly deaf, even in the 70cm range with tuned groundplane antenna.

BUT...
After some experimenting I found  that the GAIN/attenuation should be on the other end of the scale (near MIN) and then... voila...
This device even accepts the samplerate 2.000000 Msps

It receives signals down to roughly 55.63 MHZ and up to 444.970 MHz (which latter isn't OK... ExtIO and fc0013 mismatch perhaps???)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The settings in ExtIO : Terratec Noxon (rev1) are:
Remote:          OFF
Device Hint:    RTL tuner=fc0013

samplerate:    2.000000

Antenna:        (default)
Offset (ON)     0

Gain/attenuation:   MIN -6.300

nothing further
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More info on compatible hardware can be found over here:

[Balint Seeber]

Thanks for your feedback.

Setting the gain on these devices can be fiddly. They can be easily overloaded by strong signals, and so often you can get the best performance (as you mention) by turning the gain down. The trick is to watch what the noise floor does when you change the gain.

You can set the sample rate from >900 ksps to 3.2 Msps.

You shouldn't need to add 'tuner=fc0013' because tuners are automatically detected. The reason why it is mentioned a lot is because the default tuner code for the (different) E4000 tuner has issues, and the newer code can be selected manually to avoid those problems (will be done automatically in the next release).

Each tuner has a different supported tuning range, and accompanying quirks. Unfortunately I'm getting the impression that people should try their darnedest to find dongles with the E4000.

If you have any further results/observations, please continue documenting them here.