Dongle Confusion

[RF23]

I have a couple of dongles which Amazon advertised as, “NooElec TV28T v2 USB DVB-T & RTL SDR”.
On the actual dongle it reads – R820T SDR & DVB-T & on the next line, NESDR Mini

When I used the WINUSB driver and SDR# from the NooElec site, SDR# refused to recognize the Dongle and the error message stated “That the RTL2832U was not working or not hooked up”

However, when I right-click on the dongle to eject it Windows 7 64 bit recognizes the dongle as RTL2838UHIDIR. This seems to suggest that the dongle is a 2838 not a 2832 so it was not recognized.

When I checked out the RR site for solutions I found an excellent step by step guide by tylerwatt12 which suggested using a different Zadig (WINUSB driver) and SDR#. I tried them and both Zadig and SDR# looked different than the ones I used from the NooElec Site but they worked. This SDR# recognized my dongle as a R820T but in the drop-down box it still only had “Generic TRL2832U OEM” available.

Besides the naming confusion of the dongle interestingly both WINUSB divers had the exact same version number out to the last digit so it must be the different versions of SDR# that was the problem (even though the two Zadig UI were different). It seemed that the NooElec Site SDR# was newer.

So, which dongle do I have and are there two versions of SDR#?

 

[SCPD]

Windows 7 64 bit recognizes the dongle as RTL2838UHIDIR.

This is normal - even for the RTL2832U.

So, which dongle do I have and are there two versions of SDR#?

The label displayed from SDR# does not come from the actual device. There is a crowd-sourced list of USB Vendor IDs and Product IDs (VID/PID) on Reddit.

compatibility - RTLSDR

It is possible for two completely different OEM-made RTL sticks to share the same VID/PID. This map of VID/PID pairs to text label is in librtlsdr, not SDR# so it is likely you had different versions of librtlsdr as well as SDR#.

SDR# displays the version number in the window caption. The program is frequently updated. librtlsdr is also frequenctly updated. You'll need to check their respective websites for the most current versions.

If you had a very, very old version of SDR# and librtlsdr, it likely did not yet support the R820T tuner. That might explain the error you saw but I can't say for sure.

 

[RF23]

Thank you very much for this helpful information. I better understand dongles now.