GNS 5890 ADS-B Receiver USB-Stick

The software installed easily and it was up and running in five minutes. No issues in many months of use. The interface is simple and easy to use. Has a range of about 200 km in all directions at my open location. Hours of entertainment for a great price.

I haven't read through all the previous reviews, but I'll throw out what I've learned. This "will" work on Window's 10. You just have to disable driver certificates to install the driver for this receiver. When plugged in, it showed up as a Comm Port device and not under "other" in Device Manager. When it has been discovered, it just takes double clicking on it to get the pop-up window. Under the driver tab, is update driver. From there, just find where you stored the downloaded driver (it's on the supplied disc if you didn't download it). Now to the teeth gnashing stuff.... Once the dongle has been recognized by the computer, you must use the supplied program adsbScope. The biggie here is to select the proper port and speed to connect to. That should at least get you up and looking at aircraft. I wanted to use this as a feed to Flightradar24. I downloaded their program and I "thought" everything was fine. It wasn't. No feed to FR24. I also downloaded a program called Virtual Radar Server. No aircraft on that either. The provided program adsbScope has a data server built in. You have to activate that and set it up to talk to either FR24 or Virtual Radar. It took several tries with different settings to find a match that all three programs liked, but once FR24 and VRS could "see" the output data from adsbScope...... everything started working. I can see aircraft on VRS and (from the best I can tell) data is being fed to FR24. I'm actually still waiting on FR24 as there system shows me offline, but from my end.... everything is there. One issue could be the supplied antenna. I'm less than 10 miles off the approach end of three major runways at IAH. If you look at FR24, there's 30+ aircraft around, but I'm only picking up 6 or so. I waiting on a roof mount antenna to run to the dongle. Hopefully with a proper antenna, I'll receive them all. I plan on doing some screen shots and doing up a web page on this. I received a couple of replies from the manufacturer, but they didn't help my plight. I wrote FR24 several times..... absolutely nothing from them (somewhat disappointed as it is "us" that makes their system work). Anyway.... I'll update this with a link after I throw a page together.

Not Windows 8 compatible as advertised. Update: GNS has removed Win 8 compatibility claim since my purchase was made. Use: NooElec NESDR Mini USB RTL-SDR & ADS-B Receiver Set instead $20 to $30 (use link below) Search: SDRSharp, RTL-SDR, ADSBScope and RTL1090 for open-source freeware and instructions.

I bought this as my first ADS-B receiver...a sort of proof of concept before buying a more serious model. It's a good value for the price. The bundled software and included antenna make it a good turnkey product, and the size makes it great for travel. There are very cheap software defined radios that were designed for TV reception that can be hacked with 3rd party software to work as ADS-B radios. They're popular because they're cheap, but they require a fair amount of technical knowledge to set up, and offer only so-so performance. While the GNS 5890 may not offer performance that's far better than a hacked TV dongle, it does eliminate worries about downloading software from unknown sources. Since I do have the requisite technical ability, I'd probably buy a cheap TV dongle if I had it to do over again. But I'm quite satisfied with this device. In particular the included pseudo-radar software that comes with it makes it is superior to the "free" versions, and makes it worth the extra expense.

Maybe I am just extremely unlucky, this product stopped working after 3 hours of usage. The supplied software does list the serial port number but when I hit connect, the software reports "No Decoder Detected". I updated the rating from 1 star to 4 stars. Nothing changed about the product but the seller(oasis pilot supplies) was great. He actually called me on a Saturday trying to walk me through some process that fixed similar issues. That did not help me in my specific case, but I certainly appreciate the timely support. Thank you very much! ----------------- An update, the company that makes this product contacted me shortly after I got the replacement unit from oasis pilot supplies, and they sent me their newer version product for free. Both that one and the replacement unit from the dealer worked fine in the last year. So I guess I was just unlucky. Any product can have a defective unit every now and then, but people that make and sell this product all go above and beyond to take care of their customers. Thanks!