I’m pretty happy with my current setup, I may tweak the gain a little to see what happens but all in all I think the performance is pretty respectable considering the environmental conditions.
The next stage is to have an antenna mounted on my roof on top of a pole to avoid physical obstructions to the south of my location. I was wondering if this is the point where I should consider a preamp in this configuration? Or would a preamp give me some benefit in my current configuration? (Current config is Raspberry PI plugged into a Pro Stick Plus plugged directly into a Flightaware 26" antenna)
Looking at the Uputronics website, they have two preamps, a regular one and a ceramic one. What’s the difference?
My suggestions: Move the antenna outdoors first. See how things change. Then play with the ProStick Plus gain. See how that goes. Then purchase an RTL-SDR Blog pre-amp/filter.
As for the Uptronics, a ceramic filter may be better in certain cases. If money is not an issue, go for it.
If you are an experimenter, a lot can be done with cheap modules found on eBay. I use some of them, and they are fun to play with.
Uptronics offered two Preamp/filter combos. The ‘regular’ and ‘ceramic’ refer only to the filter.
The ceramic filter offers more ‘out of band’ blocking and lower insertion loss (both good things).
The only downside of the ceramic filter is the price.
The RTL-SDR filter is a good performer. It uses the cheaper SAW filter, but to improve performance, it uses three of them.
The downside of this filter (or upside if you are matching it to their V3 dongle) is that it needs power to be fed up the coax. This is by far the neatest way to power an amp, but does need either an external Bias-T or a dongle that can provide power.
Your Pro Stick Plus already has both a filter and amp built in, so unless you are in a very (RF) noisy location, there is probably little to be gained.
Put your effort into getting your antenna in the best location you can.
Two SAW filters behind each amplifier stage, one high pass filter before the first amplifier stage. Complete package is much better at blocking mobile phone towers than the ProStick Plus. But how much you gain in comparison to the ProStick Plus is hard to know until you try because the electrical noise at each location is different.
The ProStick Plus has one SAW filter behind the amplifier so depending on the noise in the area (mobile phone towers) its amplifier can get overloaded reducing reception and an external filter (dark blue one for Europe) can help.
Actually I made a mistake to buy such a wide-band rf amplifier. It will boost FM, TV, Cell phone signals, and cause cross modulation as well. That is the reason I did not use it.
I think this one should be ok. Its configuration is: RF in (antenna) → RF Amp #1-> SAW Filter #1 → RF Amp #2 → SAW Filter #2 → RF Out
I use one of these wide-band eBay amplifiers. Actually, one worse than the one you purchased, which I also did, but have not deployed yet. When combined with the eBay filter, it works OK, at least in my location. I would tried it.
As for the other one you asked for input, it’s basically the wide-band amp with the filter on board. I prefer the modules separate for more flexibility, this is why I did not go for it.
I tested this two-stage LNA for a week. The result is worse than a single-stage “noisy” LNA. Experimenting today. Removed the SAW filter at the output. Checked - it became better. Then I removed the second transistor. Left to work this way, the supply voltage - 3.8V. It became better, comparable to the “noisy” one-stage. The level of the signal without the second stage fell very much. With two cascades, it was enough to set gain = 15…20 on the dongle. It is now set at maximum gain = 49.6, there is no signal over-power. http://forum.adsbradar.ru/f18/mshu-maloshumyashie-usiliteli-dlya-ads-b-cistem-42/index33.html#post41759
I saw it sometime ago. I was attracted to it by the filter design. As I mentioned earlier, I prefer separate modules, but what ended my interest, if I recall correctly, was the BW of the filter. It’s close to 250MHz. That said, it’s only $9.99. It may be a pleasant surprise.
Some time ago I published a comparison of various amplifier modules as
part of a series of articles about hydrogen reception. At that time, an
module based on the SPF5189Z which can be bought on ebay at a low price
point turned out to be a good low cost solution. The noise figure
measured at 1420 MHz were in the 0.6 to 0.7 dB range. While not great,
this is still good enough to get some decent results. Over the time, we
have purchased a number of these devices for various applications. A
recent purchase, however, was a mixed experience. There were 6 units,
three of them were cleary underperforming. We measured 2.1, 2.4 and 1.8
dB noise figures. The other three were at 0.57 dB, equivalent to what
we had before. So if you are planning to use these, be aware that you
may not receive what you are expecting. There is an easy way to tell
the good ones from the bad ones even if you cannot measure noise
figures: We noted that the good ones had a typical current drain of
around 80 mA, whereas the bad ones were in the range of 130 to 180 mA. So the bad performance seems to be clearly correlated with power consumption. The gain of the devices was between 12.7 dB and 13.0 dB
for the bad ones and 13.9 to 14.2 dB for the good ones.
