“Excellent dongle (there's a phrase I don't use every day...) - the art here is picking one out from the myriad of possible options that is of decent quality, and Pimoroni have done a great job there.
I'm assuming for the rest of the review that you are using this for ADS-B tracking and not watching TV ;)
The telescopic antenna is good, but to get the best out of it you will need to tune it's length - a bit tricky to do - as well as getting it as high as possible.
The MCX connector on the dongle is somewhat inconvenient, as it means you will need an adaptor to connect most other antennae that you might want to upgrade to at a later date which generally have SMA or RP-SMA connectors. The MCX connector is also quite easy to dislodge (it's not really designed for external connections that often get bumped!), so you'll want to be a bit careful with it.
I'd also recommend a USB extension lead to make some space between the dongle and the computer (likely Raspberry Pi), this helps reduce near-field interference from the circuits which can reduce your successful message decode rate. Particularly getting away from wifi dongles! It's also useful to install a filter between your antenna and the dongle to remove far-field interference.
Getting this working is extremely satisfying, and with dump1090 up and running you'll be out looking at the sky saying "ooh, look, that plane over there is going to Dubai!" or "that helicopter is at 3000ft" and other fun trivia to bore^W entertain your friends and family with.”
“This is a great DVB-T SDR dongle. I used gqrx that comes with the skywavelinux live boot ISO to get things up and running really quickly. So while you're waiting for your order to arrive, download the skywavelinux ISO :-)”
“Perfect, arrived on time and easy to setup on raspberry pi with Flightradar24 being fed data within 20 minutes of taking it out of the box.
Currently tracking over 100 planes up to 170 miles away with the supplied antenna. Amazing.”
