I did not contact you.
The point is that you did not contact me.
It's about disclosure and valuing customers.
The only reason I found out that there are a few glitches with the product is that I happened to check on here. Fortunately, it does look like there are some fixes, but I just barely became aware of the problem since I was not contacted directly by the seller (Rtl-Sdr Blog) informing me of the issues (i.e. I would have had no way to know how to fix the problem or that I could get a better product in the future). The package itself has no documentation and no wording about "where to check for product news", etc. No doubt, I appreciate the innovation and providing inexpensive radios to the market, though.
Also, you might be interested to know that I received my from Amazon thrown in a ~ 5" X 5" X 10" box with no packaging material.
Welcome to Radio Reference...
Ah okay I understand what you mean now. The bias tee already has a big warning against shorting it on the V3 users guide which is where you'll need to go to download the bias tee software. The warning will stay there even if there is a resettable fuse, as you should never short the bias tee anyway. The other issues are very minor. It would be like sending a warning to users of the generic brand dongles that there is excessive noise at 480/960/1440 MHz due to a lack of USB choking, or that there are big spurs at multiples of the clock frequency, or that interference may leak in from the plastic case, or that higher L-band frequencies don't work without heatsinking. Every different dongle has their little irks, and we're just mentioning the ones we've found on our current batch, which is some increased noise surrounding very strong narrowband signals (turn the gain down or add caps and it goes away), and a big spur on HF in direct sampling mode causing overload with the bias tee turned on (there are no HF bias tee powered LNA's out there so I don't think anyone will be affected, and this does not affect use with an upconverter).
About the documentation, its online and the link is printed on the dongle. Paper documentation can go out of date fast in the SDR world, especially since we don't control the software.
Sorry about the packaging from Amazon. We've complained to them numerous times about improving it, but despite promises nothing seems to happen. The dongle and antennas are fairly sturdy though, so should not easily be damaged. Also @KD8DVR you are right. Amazon has a problem where they sometimes take defective returns and instead of putting them into the defective bins, put them into the 'sellable' bins. This way defective stock can get recycled among different customers. Fortunately the defect rate after QC that we've measured is less than 0.5% at the moment, but if you get a defective item its best to contact us directly to receive a new item without the need for a return.
@samsat. Thanks! Batch 2 will be ready at the end of September. There will probably be a ~1 week no sales gap between batches, and it will be announced on the blog and store page. It will still be V3 as the features will not change, just those irks mentioned above will be eliminated.
