It seems someone worked out that the Realtek RTL2832U found in various very cheap USB DVB-T decoders can be repurposed as a complete software-defined radio. The sidebar of this subreddit seems to be the best place to start.
Update: This is the Ezcap EZTV645 from Deal Extreme:
[175189.929963] usb 1-1.1: new high-speed USB device number 7 using ehci_hcd [175190.028379] usb 1-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=2838 [175190.028385] usb 1-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [175190.028389] usb 1-1.1: Product: RTL2838UHIDIR [175190.028392] usb 1-1.1: Manufacturer: Realtek
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0bda:2838 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2838 DVB-T
I found it more productive just go to Osmocom’s site and Gnuradio’s site directly. The compendum of personal sites was basically useless. And Reddit was even worse than useless: misleading and just makes people wasting time while trying to distinguish information from disinformation.
http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr
http://gnuradio.org/
Thanks Pete. Did you get anything working?
Basic things like FM radio work fine, but getting UAT weather turned out to be challenging: the bandwidth is too great for the sample rate that RTL chipset can deliver. Still tinkering with it, but about ready to buy a real SDR.