Real cheap Software Defined Radios, part 2

I got the Ezcap EZTV645 from Deal Extreme [sold out, sorry!]. It’s cheap (I think £20 in total) and was delivered in about 2 days. For the USB details see my previous posting.

It’s also slightly different from the description on the RTL-SDR compatibility site since it has a Fitipower FC0013 tuner instead of the slightly more desirable E4000. Here is the output of rtl_test:

# rtl_test -t
Found 1 device(s):
  0:  ezcap USB 2.0 DVB-T/DAB/FM dongle

Using device 0: ezcap USB 2.0 DVB-T/DAB/FM dongle
Found Fitipower FC0013 tuner
Supported gain values (23): -9.9 -7.3 -6.5 -6.3 -6.0 -5.8 -5.4 5.8 6.1 6.3 6.5 6.7 6.8 7.0 7.1 17.9 18.1 18.2 18.4 18.6 18.8 19.1 19.7 
No E4000 tuner found, aborting.

Compiling the software wasn’t too much of a problem. I put my Fedora spec files in this git repo.

I’ve not so far been successful at actually receiving anything, since obviously GNU Radio pretty much requires you to “build your own FM radio” from little pieces, but I’m still trying, and anyway it’s educational …

Update: It does appear to work. That very poorly defined peak at 93.5 MHz is quite probably BBC Radio 4 FM.

I’m using the crappy built-in antenna, combined with being indoors in an old house (you can’t normally get radio reception anyway in this house unless the radio is sitting next to a window). So it’s no surprise that the signal to noise ratio is so bad. Next step therefore is to look into a proper antenna.

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