Ham It Up v1.3 Barebones - Nooelec RF Upconverter for Software Defined Radio. Works with Most SDRs Like HackRF & RTL-SDR (RTL2832U with E4000, FC0013 or R820T Tuners); MF/HF Converter with SMA Jacks

Bought this with the R820T USB dongle from the same company, works great. Great service and support from NooElec, fast responses to my emails. Some of the ham software is kinda sketchy with a few GUI inconsistencies when it comes to frequency etc (the software is being updated constantly though). This has the 25MHz xtal to get it out of the FM band so I used an offset of -125,000,000 in the SDRSharp (most docs say use -100,000,000 which is for the 100MHz xtal) and tweaked from there. I think I had an adjustment of around 12 or something to get the peak just right on frequency after warmup.Also used the USB stick and this with a Raspberry Pi, connecting to it from a Windows machine using TCP.Now just need to get it into a box, hardwired (I dislike the small MCX connector) and will probably use a N type connector to easily swap antennas to experiment more.If you are a beginner, it will for sure be frustrating (the software and dongle that is - this upconverter simply plugs in) to get it running with the software, but there are a lot of guides out there.

This review is for the Ham It Up V1.3 ONLY.For me the hardest part getting this setup correctly was knowing exactly how to set the offset in the SDR# program I'm using. Once I figured out that I needed to set the shift to -125,000,463 (that's negative 125,000,463) everything fell into place. With that offset I'm able to just set the frequency I want to listen to directly in SDR#. Tuning to WWV at 10Mhz and 15Mhz helps a lot while confirming your shift.I compared received signals between this SDR setup and my Kenwood TS450SAT on the same 80M dipole and I'll say that this is slightly less sensitive than the Kenwood, but not much. Certainly very usable and a good way to explore SDR for not a lot of money.I've got all this working under Windows 10 through a USB 2,0 hub in case ayone is concerned about compatibility. I also installed this board in the NOOELEC metal enclosure designed for this board.Don't skimp on the external cabling, either. Get the correct adapters and don't jury rig those. They are readily available here on Amazon.

It works as advertised. Its just too bad that you have to go surfing the web to find out how to use it (That's why I gave it only 4 stars: No directions or directions written in "Chinglish" = Automatic 1 star deduction for any product.) It will need adapters and don't be trusting like I was - I bought some SMA adapters off eBay and never looked at them closely. Finally, after getting nothing but noise out of the Ham It Up, I looked more carefully at a male/male adapter - no "pin" in it! I wasn't getting a connection! Have your SDR# and your SDR dongle working well before trying the Ham It Up. Set the "shift" (under "radio" in the left hand column on SDR#) to -125,000,000 NOTE MINUS SIGN - This compensates for the oscillator in the Ham It Up. Go easy on the gain, around 14 or 15 works well and you won't blow out weak signals, If you want to go back to just your dongle (bypass), hit stop on SDR# first or it gets its brains scrambled. The little hassle setting it up is worth it. Great little gizmo.

There's no way this will ever beat a dedicated communications receiver, but when paired with the RTL2832U DVB Dongle, it works as well as any of the battery powered short wave receivers of two or three times the price. Using a radioshack dis-cone antenna designed for 50MHz and up, I've been able to listen in on 40M ham LSB traffic, along with tons of shortwave broadcasts after dark. It took several iterations to get the best results, but mounting this product and the DVB dongle in a metal box and soldering the interconnections seems to have minimized the RF interference from the computers. My daughter was rather unimpressed with the whole affair until she walked in to the shack last night while I was listening to the Chinese state radio... She now wants to listen every night to the Chinese lessons and thinks radio is pretty cool after all. That, all by itself, was worth the price of the converter. All that's left is to give this unit it's own HF antenna and a small tuner, similar to an MFJ-16010 and I'll be set to jet.

Have 2, build quality on the first board sucked, angled ends soldered, solder splatter, overall bad QC from factory. Other than that the second board is working nicely and seems to be stable. Be sure to read plenty on these boards before you dive in.

I own a few NooElec products—this and the matching enclosure, two NESDR SMArt units, and a Balun One-Nine—all of which are nicely built (in the US and Canada, no less) and backed by excellent customer service. The TXCO in my Ham It Up is extremely stable, as are both of my NESDR SMArts. Like, really, really stable. No drift. When I've bounced random questions off the NooElec support team on a few occasions, I've received friendly, knowledgeable, professional service with a surprisingly fast turnaround time.When choosing an upconverter, I narrowed things down to the Spyverter and the Ham It Up. I ultimately went with this unit, largely on account of my positive experiences dealing with the company. The Ham It Up's RF noise generator (requires soldering an SMA female connector to the board) is also a nice plus, and will be handy when testing other gear. For those of you who have a receiver with a bias tee, like the Airspy or RTL-SDR, you might want to consider the Spyverter.Not a paid shill, just a happy customer.