FC0013 RTL-SDRs Lack EEPROMs (and Modifiable Serials)

I recently ordered two cheap RTL-SDR dongles from AliExpress from the HTOOL store. They are branded as RTL-SDR Blog V2 dongles (as opposed to genuine V3 and V4 dongles), but I don’t believe these are authentic. I suspect that they are branded this way to portray themselves as new old stock of RTL-SDR Blog.

I knew they wouldn’t be very good; they advertised upfront that it used the Fitipower FC0013 tuner, which has a far narrower working band (22-1100MHz), as opposed to the wider range (0.5-1766MHz) covered by the R828D tuner. I did see some reviews on the product pages that they could be used for ADS-B, so I still wanted to experiment with them a bit. Someone discovered in 2020 that these FC0013 tuners could do UHF reception better by flipping a bit, and as far as I can tell, the patch has been merged with most RTL-SDR drivers.

My thought process was that given the patch and the passable ADS-B performance, I could use this dongle for ADS-B (given that my area already has very strong aggregator coverage and I’m not meaningfully filling in any gaps there even with MLAT), and dedicate my more premium RTL-SDRs to SpyServers or to lesser covered signals like Radiosondes.

If you’ve worked with ADSB.im or multiple SDRs before, you might know where I’m going with this. Most SDR applications require an unique identifier for each device to prevent conflicts when using multiple dongles simultaneously. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, because most reputable SDR dongles have programmable EEPROMs. It’s a simple rtl_eeprom -d 0 -s newserial to set a new serial number and prevent resource conflicts.

Disappointingly, the FC0013 tuners that I received don’t seem to have EEPROMs. They all have the serial number 77771111153705700, and going off a search of that serial number (sources 1, 2), all these FC0013 tuners seem to have been using the same serial number for over a decade (at least 2012).

This isn’t really impossible to work around for me, I run these RTL-SDR sticks off a mini-PC with Proxmox, so I can simply spin a new ADSB.im VM or another virtual machine, and map the tuners based on physical USB ports rather than USB Vendor Device IDs.

I can’t speak for the FC0012 tuner dongles, but I would imagine they have the same issue.