Hi, everybody--

I hope this is a good channel to ask the following question:

I am new to SDR radios and you can assume I know nothing about the
hardware that is out there, except that some of it is quite expensive.

A month or two ago I purchased a gadget called "Very Wide SDR Receiver."
It claims to work from 100KHz to 1.7GHz. It contains an SDR2832,

an SDR RTL2832Unit, and also, for HF, an LP filter, a mixer, a BPF, and
a switch to feed the output of the upconverter into the 2832 unit.

Two inputs--each one to the SPDT switch. Output is a micro USB female
connector, which came with a short cable to a standard USB

computer jack.

I'm going to build a one meter ring antenna out of copper tubing for
VLF, LF and MF reception.

I may build or buy a preamp, if I find it is desirable.

The question: I really do not want to get involved with any version of
Windows. What Linux choices do I have, and which are the easiest

to implement. (I am not a programmer. I am not afraid of the command
line, but I don't write scripts.) My choice of Linux software is

primarily PCLinuxOS (an RPM distro) or MINT 17 LTS (a deb distro). I
will run either one on a laptop at 64 Bits.

There you have it. What do you folks have for me?

--doug, WA2SAY