Those of you who are using a dedicated LNA and Filter what are you using? Went lo9king around and I found 3. One made by gipo labs and then one made by uputronics, both costing about $50
I also found a generic one on Amazon and eBay I will post a picture of for $10.
I am looking a saving money so if anyone has had any experience with the $10 one that would be great.
The other option is that nooelec has a new 1090 and 978 dual sided saw and filter combination for $85.
If you really want to save money, better not buying anything than buying a 10$ LNA, in my opinion.
I tried many options, and the best LNA I have is the RTL-SDR one. Uputronics is also very good, even if not as good as the RTL-SDR one. The performance difference is marginal, tho.
1full year with airspy+uputronics’s LNA, followed by one full year with airpsy+RTL-SDR’s LNA.
As I said, it’s marginal, but mostly visible on the range increase. I’m able to pick more distant planes with the second, and also cover some gaps/shadows who were obvious on the long term range ring from TAR1090. In short, it grabs few more things but it’s not a 20% increase, more 5% here and there. I suppose it’s linked to the higher gain of the RTL-SDR one.
If you’re not into chasing the ultimate small improvement, the uputronics is great! And possibly what I notice is not what most people will notice. I suspect that the dongle also has to do with it: what the Airspy is able to catch in marginal conditions is perhaps not visible with another receiver.
I suppose this isn’t the RTL-SDR wideband LNA but the dedicated ADS-B model ?
That ADS-B model is hard to get hold of, it has been out of stock for quite some time.
I have similar results between the Uputronics LNA and RTL-SDR LNA. Might be lower noise in the RTL-SDR LNA, or perhaps a better bandpass at 1090. Both are used with an Airspy R2. Not positive, but the RTL-SDR unit seems to use less power than the Uputronics unit so seems to be cooler while under use. The lower temps could contribute to the lower noise factor. I do use heat sinks on both LNA units. That definitely helped my reception. Always something to learn at these frequencies.
A bit late for a response but I’ve went through 2 of these already. I bought 1 initially, worked great until it didn’t. Having no case is a bummer. So I shrink wrapped it, wrapped the shrink wrap with aluminum tape and grounded to the connectors for EMI protection then shrink wrapped it again for isolation. It was working great until I disconnected it for an upgrade. I replaced my cables with LMR240 and switched to a pcb antenna from aliexpress (which preforms surprisingly nicely btw, also tested on nanovna turns out an swr of 1.196 at 1090mhz) When connected everything together again I got zero reception. Checking all the possible failure points I noticed the unit was hot to the touch. When I removed the make shift case i found out the transistor was smoking hot. I thought I caused the overheat with my shrink wrap enclosure and ordered 2 more.
Meanwhile I removed the burnt out components and shorted the filter on the board and used it as a filter only before my RTL-SDR blog LNA. This gave similar results but with a tad bit worse performace.
(since then I had the chance to test the filter on the nanovna and it is spot on accurate with 1.55db loss at the pass band and around 30db attenuation at the out of band frequencies. BTW this unit cannot be powered with bias tee)
The replacements arrived and this time I used an aluminum lined 3d printed enclosure purpose built for this LNA. Worked like a charm again no overheating what so ever. But then I had to disconnect it again to experiment. I wanted to connect the failed unit that I turned into a filter after the LNA for further filtering. Guess what, it burned out again like the last time.
Now I have the last unit running my setup and I’m not risking to touch it until I have a replacement.
I still don’t know what the cause of the burn outs were but I am considering these options now.
