Cheap RTL2832U / FC0012 gives "No supported tuner found", but has I2C devices

Hi All

I bought a cheap DVB-T stick that was supposed to be a RTL2832U with a FC0012 tuner with RTL-SDR support. As might have been expected given the price, it doesn't work. The various rtl_ tools all report "No supported tuner found", eg rtl_eeprom gives:

Found 1 device(s): 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM

Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM No supported tuner found Enabled direct sampling mode, input 1

Current configuration: __________________________________________ Vendor ID: 0x0bda Product ID: 0x2838 Manufacturer: Realtek Product: RTL2838UHIDIR Serial number: 00000001 Serial number enabled: yes IR endpoint enabled: yes Remote wakeup enabled: no __________________________________________

The vendor did give me a full refund suspiciously quickly, so clearly the lack of advertised RTL-SDR compatibility is well known to them!

I then took the cover off, and it does have a chip that's labelled RTL2832U, plus another similar sized one I can't read the label of.

After a bit of searching, I found this old post with a patch to list all the I2C devices: https://www.mail-archive.com/osmocom-sdr@lists.osmocom.org/msg00454.html

That reports:

I2C devices found: 20 a0 a2

So there is something working there, but I'm not sure if it's enough...

Is there any hope for this stick? And if so, what would my next steps be?

Thanks Nick