DVB-T Stick SDR Guide
Technical Details …
As an example, we use here a GiXa Technology DVB-T stick.
The package is complete as usual with such DVB-T Stick.
In addition to the USB stick there comes a remote control, an instruction manual, a driver CD and of course the supplied antenna. The Antenna isn’t really sufficient for our purposes.
Let us take a look inside the DVB-T Stick.
There is not really much to see here at first. In addition to the sockets for antenna, USB, IR receiver and LED there are various SMD components and two large ICs on the board. Precisely these two microchips are very important. The Realtek RTL2832U is a signal converter/demodulator which provides the data fed to the Universal Serial Bus in readable form.
The second chip is the real brain/heart of the stick. The Rafael R820T is a tuner chip that translates the radio waves into data and forwards it to the signal converter.
Once you’ve installed the driver from the supplied CD / DVD and the software starts, this data is displayed by the software as tv signals. Unfortunately, the whole thing has a big catch, because the included drivers only use the standard DVB-T frequency range UHF / VHF. Possibly the FM area is still covered to receive radio stations. All other frequency bands are ignored by the driver and can not be retrieved from the software.
This is exactly where our SDR journey begins.