DVB-T+FM+DAB+820

The DVB-T+FM+DAB 820T2 & SDR is a USB 2.0 Digital TV Tuner Stick that enables you to watch digital terrestrial television broadcasts and listen to DAB radio, and FM radio. This blue coloured dongle consists of RTL2832U+R820T2 P5 chipset, where the R820T2 IC is a high-performance low power advanced digital TV tuner chip manufactured by Rafael Microelectronics in Taiwan. This tuner IC covers a wide range of broadcast standards such as DVB-T, ATSC, DMB-T, and ISDB-T. Silicon tuner chips are the future because they have low power consumption and are much smaller than conventional tuners with metal shielding. The RTL2832U IC is a demodulator chip which in addition provides USB connectivity to a computer, and manufactured by Realtek Semiconductor Corporation.

This particular stick supports Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Win 7. It uses MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 (H.264) encoding.I was able to attach a much larger antenna and receive many broadcasts that I thought was never possible. It is a nice little gadget which kept me amused for a few days scanning for police and aeroplane broadcasts.
On my Windows 7 32-bit machine, I had no problems installing the software and drivers that came with the accompanying CD. I had it all installed within minutes and began scanning for channels. I thought it was intuitive and did not need to read the manual. Installation on a Windows 10 64-bit machine went smoothly, however it would not find any channels during the scan. The problem was with the drivers, because it was automatically replacing them with its own latest ones. After swapping the driver files from my Windows 7 machine, it worked well.

I live near the Crystal Palace transmitter where the signal strength is very good, and I was able to receive all the digital terrestrial channels. The antenna wire is approximately 42 inches long and I simply taped it to a wall as high as possible. I was also able to scan and receive DAB and FM radio broadcasts.
The software is fast and responsive, however when the signal strength is low, it can appear to be stuck for a few seconds, which is very common on most applications such as this.

The SDR driver and software available on the Internet has the capability to scan a wide range of frequencies (typically 25MHz to 1800MHz) and display the result on a computer. It looks a little like a spectrum analyser or oscilloscope display, with the purpose of showing where the useful signals are. It has exciting applications in Radio Astronomy, and HAM Radio fields. If you are interested in digital signal processing, then there is a whole new world of experiments, modifications, and hacks that you could follow.

I bought this on eBay and it came all the way from China. It cost around five pounds including postage, which was a great bargain. It took three weeks to arrive and it was adequately packed for the journey. On eBay, they have given it a long name calling it "USB 2.0 Digital DVB-T SDR+DAB+FM HDTV TV Tuner Receiver Stick RTL2832U+R820T2 P5". Before you all rush off to eBay to buy one, please take the time to read the rest of this multi-page article with photographs of my endeavours.