{"id":5334,"date":"2017-02-06T10:24:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-05T23:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/02\/06\/adding-a-homebrew-front-end-to-an-rtl-sdr-hdsdr-receiver\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T18:45:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:45:58","slug":"adding-a-homebrew-front-end-to-an-rtl-sdr-hdsdr-receiver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/02\/06\/adding-a-homebrew-front-end-to-an-rtl-sdr-hdsdr-receiver\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding a Homebrew Front End to an RTL-SDR HDSDR Receiver"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/RTLSDRfrontend.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"265\" src=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/RTLSDRfrontend.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p> <b>I started playing with the RTL SDR dongles again. I wanted to use them to confirm that my BITX signal is NOT 9 kc wide (it is not). I also wanted to try to confirm the aircraft band frequencies in use in this area. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>So I got the HDSDR software running and plugged in the dongle that I had modified for HF use. It worked great, but I could see (literally SEE) that it needed some bandpass filtering and perhaps a bit of RF gain. So today I threw together this device. Dual gate MOSFET (gates tied together) with an LC filter on the gate. Power from Malaysia via the 9V battery. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>It works great. It was fun to add a bit of homebrew to an otherwise soul-less commercial receiver. But beware: that waterfall is addictive, even for a hardcore Hardware Defined Radio guy like me.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I started playing with the RTL SDR dongles again. I wanted to use them to confirm that my BITX signal is NOT 9 kc wide (it is not). I also wanted to try to confirm the aircraft band frequencies in use in this area. So I got the HDSDR software running and plugged in the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/02\/06\/adding-a-homebrew-front-end-to-an-rtl-sdr-hdsdr-receiver\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Adding a Homebrew Front End to an RTL-SDR HDSDR Receiver&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[453,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-malaysia","category-sdr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5336,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334\/revisions\/5336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}