Supplied SDR (DVB-T) Antenna Operating Near 15 GHz!!!

I bought a couple of SDR (DVB-T) dongles recently. In general the antennas that come with these are basically cheap junk across the board with few exceptions.



I always carry the SDR dongle with a homebrew HF Upconverter, Long Wire Antenna, and the UHF vertical antenna that was supplied with the dongle in my backpack. Last weekend I was tinkering around with the SDR at home and hooked up the supplied UHF antenna. (BTW... I almost never have used this antenna because normally I have used the SDR for listening to HF). Much to my dismay, I could just barely hear a signal that I was generating locally with my GPS Controlled Frequency Generator.

Strange.... So, I started looking into the problem, tried a different antenna and found that all was well. O.k. so now I knew the problem was at least localized to the Supplied UHF antenna, attached coax cable or connector. Here is a photo of the base of the antenna...

I carefully removed the protective plastic from the base of the antenna (basically just a sticker applied to the base), then carefully pried out the small metal insert that has the magnet attached. Here is what I found...

A 15Ghz Quarter Wave Antenna! (i.e. about a half-centimeter of un-terminated coax end).

Talking about a cold solder joint. Man! it was horrible! Anyway, I fired up the trusty BlackJack BK6000 Solder Station (I highly recommend the BK8000) and quickly had the coax center conductor re-soldered to the antenna connection.

TaDa! Bob's your Uncle! The antenna is still a cheap piece of junk but signals are now received.

Click on the image below to learn more and purchase the BlackJack BK8000 Soldering Station with Hot Air Gun, Solder Pencil, and Solder Removal / Extractor Gun.