Combining the bandwidth of two RTL-SDR dongles in GNU Radio

The maximum usable and stable bandwidth of an RTL-SDR is about 2.4 MHz. In order to get larger bandwidths it is possible to combine two or more dongles, although doing so comes with a big limitation – since the clocks and signal phases between separate dongles would not be synchronised, it would be impossible to decode a wideband signal this way. However, combining dongles for larger bandwidths is still useful for visualizing the spectrum through an FFT plot, or perhaps for decoding various separate narrowband signals. Although creating a wide band FFT plot with multiple dongles is fairly simple, we haven’t seen much software do this before.

However now RTL-SDR.com reader Oliver wrote in to show us the GNU Radio script he’s been using to combine the bandwidths of two RTL-SDR dongles together to get a 4.4 MHz FFT display. The script can be used to get a combined 4.4 MHz spectrum visualization without a center dip from roll off, or a 4.8 MHz spectrum with rolloff. Oliver writes:

I simply took two RTL-SDR dongles at their max. band width of 2.4 MHz, resampled the signals to 4.8 MHz, then shifted the first signal down by 1MHz, the other one 1 MHz up, added them together, divided the combined signal by 2 and finally feed it into a FFT plot.

At first, I tried shifting the signals by 1.2 MHz to get full 4.8 MHz, but I realized, that I had a notch in the center, so I reduced the frequency shift until I had no notch anymore.

The Bandwidth Combiner GRC Script