OK gang - interested in your experiences, if any, supplementing #HF #HamRadio with SDR. Two questions: 1. worth it/useful? 2. Dongle or $$ version? Thanks for the feedback! I have a dongle, which doesn't do great on HF at all, and before investing in a switch, or higher quality SDR, wanting to know if the juice is worth the squeeze.
@k0in My home websdr/RX station is a cheap commercial discone and a couple of the RTL-SDR dongles with built-in upconverters (and a little resistive splitter). It does okay, despite living in a very noisy city: https://pskreporter.info/pskmap.html?preset&callsign=aj9bm&timerange=86400
@k0in Oh! It occurs to me that I left out one important part! I have some homebrew filters to cut out random bits of crap. They're little milled PCBs with very simple filters on them. I'm sure they cost me a lot of signal strength, but they were also roughly free.
I could probably whip up a few more of them if you needed some. I'll have to find a Hawkeyes-branded tin to put them in, though, which may be difficult to do here in San Francisco.
@AJ9BM Actually, I live in Ames, and work at Iowa State. ;) I'm looking to transmit as well, and really need horizontal polarization. Thanks for responding!!