SDR Temperature

[elpipila]

NooElec R820T SDR Surface Temperature. 49 C – Hot!!!
Looks like I better order some spares.

Found that best thermal cooling is when The Pi and SDR are in vertical tower position.
The hottest side is touching the support surface when plugged into a horizontally mounted Raspberry Pi .

A friend of mine was a good friend of Seymour Cray (went through high school with him). He said Seymour spent a significant amount of his performance improvement time working on cooling.

I’ve had similar experiences with faint satellite signals where I could stabilize low grade signal by cooling the lnb with Peltier cooling down to the -20 C range. It reduces noise in the circuitry.

[obj]

What are you doing to it?! None of mine run anywhere near that hot, they’re all barely warm to the touch.

Your best bet is probably the “bucket of sand” approach - since the crystals are uncompensated, you want stability more than cooling.
Thermal noise is hardly an issue given how generally noisy the receivers are anyway