SDR improvement

After seeing an article on the RTL-SDR blog and a more detailed article on the SDR for Mariners blog I decided that to eliminate the excess heat (and by association the excess frequency drift) I would use a cooling method from this page, immerse stick in can of cooking oil.

This cooling method hast two plus-points

1. The liquid is not conductive and no damage to the stick should occur
2. The can will act as a faraday cage, the SDR alone contains no metal screen and picks up everything in it's surrounding environment easily without an antenna (I tried this with a CB radio connected to a home brew dummy load in close proximity with the gain at 0, it picked it up with little problem), in a metal enclosure it should not pick up anything

The can I have chosen is the largest golden syrup tin I could find, I have chose to modify this with two connectors, BNC for the antenna (this will be of the 50Ω impedance, rather than the 75Ω the dongle would expect but a mismatch shouldn't be an issue, to allow compatibility with scanner antennas), and a Neutrik NAUSB-W chassis mount USB port set up with the "B" side on the outside of the tin and the "A" side inside to connect the dongle to.

These will be sealed with silicone to stop the oil leaking out of the connectors and to keep air out.

I'll report back on how this works, apparently it works quite well according to what I have read.

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