SDR Newbie in need of help

[tvdxer]

Hello,

I recently purchased a cheap USB DVB-T stick based on the Broadcom RTL2832 / E4000 tuner. I installed the software per the instructions found on this site (or some other, I can't remember), as well as the drivers on the CD that shipped with the dongle (which I think might have been a bad idea). Anyway, in HDSDR, when I press "Start" and the SDR is tuned to a strong frequency (e.g. strong enough for any radio to receive with its bare antenna terminals), all I hear is noise. These are FM frequencies (162.550 MHz, 100.5 MHz, etc.) and the radio is obviously in the FM mode. The waterfall display shows a signal that is strongest near the center and that falls off as you go off the center, but it also does this for any frequency. Could anybody help somebody totally new to this?

[Markb]

You were correct that installing the drivers that came with the stick was a bad idea. Not the end of the world, though. Just go to the device manager and uninstall the drivers.
You need to use a program called Zadig to install the correct one.
Go to RTLSDR.org and click on the Windows link under software for the instructions. There is an additional plugin that you will need to run the RTL with HDSDR, which I am not too familiar with. I switched to SDR# and haven't looked back.

Mark

[xeno194]

Zadig is here
libwdi - Browse /zadig at SourceForge.net

and to get it to work with HDSDR just copy this file to your hdsdr directory
https://github.com/josemariaaraujo/E.../ExtIO_RTL.dll

Good luck
Mike