NooElec Newsky tv28T V2 and sdr# help!

[telxonmaster]

I just bought the Newsky TV28T V2 sdr from Nooelec and can't get it to work with sdr# for some reason.

Everything seems to work, but I'm not picking anything up. When I tune to any frequency, the white noise goes away and I hear nothing. Also I'm not seeing the signals I'd expect in my area, definitely not what I see on my spectrum analyzer. What am I missing?

Here's the one I bought, and I'm also using the software they had linked on their ebay page:
Newsky TV28T V2 USB DVB T Rtl SDR Receiver RTL2832U R820T Tuner MCX Input | eBay

My computer has USB 2.0, and it's plugged into the pc directly (no hubs).

Your help is appreciated!

 

[telxonmaster]

Well, I feel like a fool! I believe this antenna is junk! I am going to make a better one and continue to experiment with this.
I read another post discussing a similar problem and have set my software like that in the other post. I'm now picking up the local NOAA weather station.

Thanks anyway! I'll let everyone know on here how it went.

 

[telxonmaster]

Working fine now! the supplied antenna is a joke! Now I just need to play with it and see what I can make her do.

 

[imsuchageek]

How about sharing that post you found so people like me, having the same problem, can make some headway on this issue as well..... Thanks....

 

[pluto7777]

Working fine now! the supplied antenna is a joke! Now I just need to play with it and see what I can make her do.

Oh yeah those antennas that come with these dongles are absolute junk. Just toss them and build yourself a nice ground plane or dipole.

Amateur Quarter Wave Ground Plane Antenna Calculator
Build Your Own Dipole and Inverted V Antennas for Performance

 

[popnokick]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B350 Safari/8536.25)

The Off-Center Fed Dipole (OCFD) described here in the RR Antenna Wiki is easy to make, inexpensive, and works well with my NooElec SDR dongles:
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Homebrewed_Off-Center_Fed_Dipole

 

[aharry]

By far the biggest issue for new SDR# installs with RTL dongles is the gain is set to zero and the best you can get is usually strong FM stations. Open the configure box (next to where you select your device) and set the gain and you will pick up tons of signals even with the little dweeby antenna that comes with the dongle unless you are really out in the boondocks.

 

[foxtail]

The antenna that comes with it may be weak...but it is by no means junk. It can be used for the higher bands, 800mhz and up. Lots of folks are using it for tracking of aircrafts. It's cut for high freqs. I've only played with it in the higher bands to track planes. I do have an outdoor discone which works much better....but the included antenna does work.

 

[pluto7777]

The antenna that comes with it may be weak...but it is by no means junk. It can be used for the higher bands, 800mhz and up. Lots of folks are using it for tracking of aircrafts. It's cut for high freqs. I've only played with it in the higher bands to track planes. I do have an outdoor discone which works much better....but the included antenna does work.

I can't speak for the TV28T, but the antenna that came with my Terratec is poor even for tracking aircraft. I spent 30 minutes hopping around before shoving it back in the box and heading to the garage for wire. I also live close to DFW so it's not like I'm miles away from civilization.

 

[majoco]

The grandkids think the antenna is a great place for their gronk.....