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

It works great on my Yaesu FRG-9600, a 1980's-era VHF/UHF receiver. Contrary to a reviewer's claim, the Ham It Up does more than just 'give a taste' of shortwave listening. Actually, it's become my primary set up for HF utility Dx'ing. Here's my story: about a year ago I sold my beloved Icom IC-R75. Not long after I went into 'withdrawals', not being able to Dx the shortwaves, copy Ham QSO's, and so on. I figured the cheapest solution was to find an upconverter for the FRG-9600 and hope for the best. I discovered the Ham It Up 1.2, purchased it and crossed my fingers. Lo & behold -- I've been using this 'unique combination' for a year now, copying CW on 160-meters, RTTY on 80-meters, WeatherFax on 8 MHz and SSTV on 20-meters. The same receiving I'd do on an Icom IC-R75. No, it isn't quite as sharp as the R75, but it ain't that far off either. And when I want to go back to VHF/UHF I just flick a switch. What a bargain too, for the level of wideband reception I've been getting.

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.

This product works very well, it does what its designed to do great, but for power I soldered 2 wires directly to the board and provide 5V that way as I didn't like the tiny micro usb connector for the 5V power input. Maybe its common practice today for devices to use micro usb but its way to small and weak to be using this on the bench for radio work. They should have used a brarrel type connector for power. 12V input with an onboard 5V regulator would seem more logical to me as most hams use 12V supplies for their Mobile/Bench radios already. I understand that this product was intended for the RTL, Funcube Dongle market and hence the usb power requirement but you will require two independant usb ports to supply enough power for both devices and not an unpowered usb hub as it will cause a usb power supply error on your PC if you try it without a powered hub. My concern was valid as another Ham friend of mine has already broken his micro usb connecor off the board. Also they don't provide the micro usb cable for power so this an additional expense. The worst thing about this unit is that I haven't found a suitable project box to put this into yet, I would have paid a little extra if it had been boxed from the manufacturer. I know its sold for the Ham market and us Hams are supposed to be able to build things from spare parts etc, but for the cost of a plastic box , maybe even a metal box. I think most people would pay a little extra. What this does lack is an extra connector for a seperate VHF/UHF and HF Input so you can leave both HF/VHF antennas connected and switch between them with the onboard switch. The switch provides a pass though option only. The price is good compared to other up-converters on the market but I hope they add a box and different power option in the future.

If you're into SDR radio stuff this is a must have for frequencies below 25 MHZ. It works good too

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.

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.

I use this in tandem with Nooelec's DVB-T dongle with the Elonics 4000 tuner. My antenna is a 43 foot vertical. I must say this is a poor man's/tinkerer's entry into the world of shortwave listening using Software Defined Radio. I use this to listen to AM radio, shortwave broadcasters, HF aeronautical, hams on 160/80/40/30/20/15/10 meters, time signal stations, other utility stations such as FAX/RTTY/DGPS/LF beacons/ALE, etc. It is stable enough to decode FAX, RTTY (you need other software to decode these stations though). For the price what you get in fun and listening pleasure is unbelievable. And this is from someone who is a ham for 35 years and a shortwave listener since the mid-60's. Since purchasing this product I am now a victim of sleep deprivation - cannot go to bed, I'm having too much fun using it! And the staff at Nooelec are the friendliest, knowledgeable, and committed folks I have ever dealt with. They are there to answer all your questions promptly.

After trying all kinds of things to make sure I wasn't causing the problem I concluded this device was putting out all kinds of hash noise. I shared several screen shots with the company and they also concluded the unit had a problem. To their credit, they were very responsive and worked with me over the phone for quite a while until it was clear that we were not able to resolve the problem, they shipped me a new unit. Unfortunately this new unit also is a bum unit. Their NESDR Mini 2 dongle works like a charm but I'm just not able to receive the lower frequencies without a good working upconverter. I probably should have returned everything and started over but too late now. I continued trying to work with it and get it to work.

Lo compré junto con dos Nooelec SMArtSDR y poder montar un servidor websdr con Raspberry Pi bajo Raspbian. Es prácticamente necesario si se quieren recibir frecuencias en la banda HF ya que el SDR por si solo se queda sordo por debajo de los 100Mhz. El producto se ve bien acabado y hace lo que se espera, en mi caso con una antena dipolo-V echa con cable (5m aprox por hilo) recibe bastante bien multitud de frecuencias en HF. Se echa en falta una toma de 5v para no depender de la toma USB y quizás también el poder sacar unos pines para un conmutador externo del passthrough (para los que nos gusta cacharrear un poco) En definitiva buen producto, combinado con el NEDSDR y dos antenas más o menos decentes tienes al alcance un receptor capaz de recibir un buen rango de frecuencias.

20%誤差の抵抗値が実際は２０％も指針をずらしてますけど。 その理由から0.8鈴メッキ線が使えません。 ミキサーを組んでいるのですが使えるアウトプット用カップリングコンデンサを4.7uF/250VSantanにしました。抵抗誤差からくる問題ですべてを組めませんでした。日本国内からすべてを調達して最初からやり直しになります。ここまでの時間はなんだったのだか、 しかしこんな部品設計で潜水艦とかロケットミサイルとか人工衛星つくってたのでしょうね。はっきり言ってもらわせるとやめた方がいいですよ。こんなやつは国を亡ぼしますよねぇ

E' un ottimo upconveter da usare con gli SDR tipo quelli economici basati sui chip RTL 2832 (o anche con airspi) per la ricezione delle frequenze HF da 0 a 30 mhz. Ha un buon LNA dentro, e la conversione si disinserisce con l'apposito interruttore. Si alimentra tramite usb (anche un alimentatore da cellulare va bene). Indispensabile prendere anche la scatola in metallo per renderlo un oggetto completo, e la isola anche da interferenze esterne. Il fatto poi di "alzare" la frequenza di 125 Mhz lo rende migliori di quelli che alzano di 100 Mhz (che finiscono nella disturbata zona delle stazioni FM commerciali) Per il prezzo che ha è il migliore upconveter in circolazione.

I am fully licensed as a radio amateur, but for just receiving 0-30MHz this is a great product. What it does is basically gives you an intermediate signal at 125MHz to pass to realtek dongle which was originally designed for TV via USB reception, but using freely available software you can make this dongle receive around 24MHz to 1700MHz, so clearly, to get frequencies below 24MHz you need to add the upconverter which can receive below 30MHz and present it to the USB dongle at 125MHz, (well away from broadcast commercial radio). With the two items together you have a software defined receiver that goes from 0-1700Mhz in all modes provided by such free software as SDR# (sdr sharp) I did have a small problem to start with, the main crystal was totally missing from my order, for reasons unknown it is not plugged into the board by the seller, but a couple of emails and a bit of waiting had the missing crystal sent to me from USA. I plugged it into the socket on board and it worked fine. It requires a USB A to B connector to power it, this is not included with the board. A neat little switch allows passthrough to allow direct access to your USB realtek dongle which is handy should you wish to use 1090MHz aircraft virtual radar software which shows real time aircraft info on windows PC, again this is free software! The main aerial connectors are SMA, which I bought adapters for because SMA is difficult to connect to coaxial cables, and am now planning on fitting all the bits into one metal box for ease of use. The future of radio really will be software defined, since this requires far less hardware and has so many possibilities that your standard radios just can't do unless you pay thousands of pounds. My whole setup has cost around £50, so for a very capable receiver and signal analyser, why would anyone do it another way? 0-1700MHz is a massive range, and for the money can't be beaten. Making all this work requires only a very basic understanding of electronics, it is more like making Lego fit together than anything, and I'm very impressed with the quality of this item. Delivery is reasonable, around a couple of weeks so all good if you are not in a rush.

Probably the best, if not one of the best app converter’s for SDR radio use in the HF frequency band. It’s a great place to start, especially if you’re radio has no app converter built into it, otherwise you won’t be able to receive those AGF or lower frequencies. (The new plus version of this particular up converter is also a great place to start as it goes even way lower in frequency.) This version, is the ‘second version’ of the NooELEC upconverter, and preferred over the old first version. You can’t get much better than this, and is built with and by Canadians AND Americans, so you know it’s of the highest build quality! (As soon as I’ve got the cash I’m liable to buy another one of these, including the new ‘plus’ version to get all those juicy low to ultra-low frequencies that are just out of reach of this particular upconverter. That being said, this unit is still an excellent way to get into shortwave listening and is a MUST if your RTL-SDR radio has none included in it’s internal circuitry. Connecting to the HF antenna without an upconverter will get you nothing, so you need this to be complete. It’s what I tell my friends who are interested in Shortwave and HF listening.