INTRODUCTION

The Realtek RTL2832U is a 6 mm square chip (QFN) with 12 pins per side. It uses 3.3 Volts and a 28.8 MHz crystal. The chips datasheet comes with a non-disclosure agreement. The IC is a DVB-T COFDM Demodulator. DVB-T stands for Digital Video Broadcasting: Terrestrial and COFDM stands for Coded Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing. The “U” in the name stands for the USB (2.0) interface. USB uses 4 pins: +Voltage, D-, D+, and ground. A USB extension cord is recommended with RTL-SDR to keep the radio away from computer generated noise. The RTL2832U contains eight general purpose input/output ports and an infrared remote control port.