FUNcube Dongle

Folks,

A combination of continued high demand and the global chip shortage has meant we’ve just run out of stock again.

We’re working with our board assembler to set up for another production run, and we nearly have all the parts ready. There’s just one part we’re waiting for confirmation on, (it’s sourced, we’re just organising the requisite paperwork as it’s a new distributor for us) then we’ll be in a position to schedule another production run in the next couple of weeks.

Many thanks , Howard

We’re happy to announce that we have new stock!

Please follow this secure link to order.

We’re being increasingly hit by the global component shortages, mainly for certain semiconductors, which has led to us being out of stock for some weeks.

Despite our own forward planning, we’ve been let down by some major distributors who haven’t met their projected lead times, to the extent where we’re having orders cancelled on us on the scheduled day of dispatch, after ordering several months ahead.

The situation isn’t improving. Increasingly, as well as distributors, we’re having to use brokers to source parts, but quotes are coming in at grossly inflated prices: being a broker is a good business to be in right now! So please be aware that we may have to adjust pricing appropriately in the near future to reflect this trend.

We’re pleased to announce that we now some limited stock available for purchase.

You can order now by following this secure link.

Thank you for your patience.

Over the past month it’s proven difficult to keep stock, but we look forward to having stock ready within the next few days.

During the pandemic, we’ve seen a significant uptick in sales of the FUNcube Dongle, and this trend continues.

While we’ve managed to maintain stock for most of the past twelve months, it’s not been easy, and for the last month or so unfortunately we’ve been running on empty. The perfect storm combination of increased demand, logistics delays due to the pandemic, and more recently the global parts shortages, have all impacted our ability to maintain stock.

We look forward to updating inventory availability within the coming days. Thank you for your patience.

Folks

I’m delighted to let you know that we’re back in stock, you can order now by following this secure link.

Thank you all for your patience.

Folks

Again due to unexpected high demand this year, our stocks have been depleted again. On this occasion we had an unexpectedly long lead time on one part which has now arrived, and the boards are now being assembled.

We expect to have fully completed and tested stock again within the next week.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience.

Folks

A quick update for you, I am delighted to announce that the FUNcube Dongle Pro+ works perfectly on Windows 10, in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

There’s no need for any driver updates, by design the FUNcube Dongles have been designed to use drivers already shipped with the operating system, and require no special or separate installation from your SDR software.

Many thanks, Howard

Folks

Apologies, the website was offline for a few hours. We’ve brought it back online now.

Many thanks for your patience. Howard

Folks

As you may know, although the FUNcube Dongle was originally designed with receiving signals from space in mind, there’s nothing special about extraterrestrial radio waves when compared to those on terra firma.

In fact, at least one FUNcube Dongle has even found its way into space itself on board a satellite.

Back here with our feet on the ground, I received a link to an article in TechRepublic about security researchers at Tel Aviv University using the FUNcube Dongle to sniff the ether around computers, and determine security keys in a so-called side-channel attack.

Normally the RF hash associated with computers is something that we try to avoid, but as far as I can tell, the researchers sniff the RF fingerprint of the cipher algorithms from the computer, and from that they can determine keys used in schemes like RSA.

The original report is here.

Folks,

Today we spent some time with the new Raspberry Pi 2 and the FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus.

As many will be aware, the original Raspberry Pi had a problem with its USB host stack, for which I released a workaround here: this simply reduced the dongle’s bandwidth so that the Raspberry Pi could keep up.

Well the good news is that the Raspberry Pi 2 so far does not seem to show the same limitation. I recorded an hour of full bandwidth this afternoon, and it plays back perfectly, which would not have happened with the original Raspberry Pi.

Talking of the Pi 2 in general, this is a very significant update. Compiling code natively on the original Pi was hard work, it was tediously slow. Frequently, you’d cross-compile, which although is frequently done, it’s hard to set up and the environment needs continually tweaking and updating. On the Pi 2 on the other hand, it’s like night and day, it’s a piece of cake to compile your code natively. I was really enjoying running both a native screen and keyboard/mouse combo together with a VNC X session simultaneously, it really is a joy to use.

Many thanks, Howard