This clumsy Analog to Digital Converter / USB That's because it's only designed for FM radio. Anything more would have been overkill for the manufacturer's purposes. This is still excellent value for $20 and hasn't been much of a stumbling block for what most people have been doing so far. The infuriating predilection it has to crash every time you want I'm not sure where you're looking in the docs, but if you're using Balint's USRP ExtIO (as oppposed to the - I think - Osmocom ExtIO) then there are two sets of code for the tuner. The default one offers slightly wider frequency range, but crashes as you have seen. If you add "tuner=e4k" to the device hint then it will switch to the newer code, which doesn't crash, at the expense of having some gaps in the frequency coverage. First, I attached a high gain audio amplifier's input directly to the Presumably this reduces your bandwidth from 3.2MHz to 96kHz, which is 24kHz too low to properly receive wideband/consumer FM radio. Since many people are using the RTLSDR has a kind of glorified RF scanner, I am wondering whether you're trying to do something you really should be doing on a high end device like the USRP? Next is to hack into and record the I2C sent to the Tuner, so it may be Don't quote me on this but AFAIK the RTL just passes the I2C commands through unchanged. This is how the existing E4000 tuner code was able to be adapted to the RTL2832 so quickly. This list probably isn't the best place to ask about this sort of thing - it's mostly developers focused on improving the hardware rather than getting people started with it. I strongly recommend switching to the ultra-cheap-sdr list[1] instead, which has many more people able to help beginners. Your question about the device crashing is answered quite often, for example. These people can also point you to the many 'getting started' guides, which do explain clearly with screenshots where to put device hints and the like. Cheers, Adam. [1] https://groups.google.com/d/**forum/ultra-cheap-sdr<https://groups.googl… can subscribe via e-mail here if you don't want to use the web interface)

From what I understand, the digital TV standard here in Canada is The DVB-T option isn't much use to anyone, because we all bought the device for SDR purposes :-) No disrespect, but wanting to use the device just for FM radio is a bit of a waste - you have the Swiss Army Knife of radio receivers, but you only want to use the corkscrew? Just for the record, there are no kernel drivers for the SDR side of things, it's all done in userspace. This userspace code, developed by people on this list, is designed to operate under Linux and it then gets ported to Windows. So luckily for you, running Linux means you'll always have easy access to the latest userspace driver code, before it gets to Windows. Unfortunately so much SDR software is Windows only, especially the packages aimed at beginners like myself, who don't know enough about RF yet to get any GNURadio flow graphs working. Personally the best I have done so far is to run HDSDR under Wine, and use the Linux BorIP server to pass data (via loopback TCP) between Wine and the RTL device. This allows HDSDR to run pretty much the same as it does under Windows. But of course HDSDR can't quite do FM radio (since it only goes up to 96kHz), but it does work really well for receiving other NBFM and AM broadcasts (police, aircraft, etc.) Cheers, Adam.