The SDR (NESDR) crashed a number of times when temperature locally got up to 32 C a few weeks ago, very unusual for us. The miniPC and SDR sits in a black plastic box a few metres behind the telescope and hence does get direct sunlight on these hot days.
I have attached SDR to an aluminium heat sink and purchased a computer fan pair which is powered through USB connection, and started these up today.
It will probably be next year before the temperature gets high enough again to test the system!
On the 2nd photo left hand side from top to bottom in order:
Top = dual fan installed today, powered through USB on the miniPC, dual fan purchased from Aliexpress.co.uk
Middle = NESDR attached to large aluminium heat-sink, obtained used from ebay.co.uk at a very reasonable price.
Bottom = HIB relay switching board from amazon.co.uk which is powered via the computer and is controlled via a setting in Easy Radio Astronomy (ezRA) software (Ted Cline, Github). This switch is used to switch on and off the option to use a 50 ohm dummy load within the barebones version of the Nooelec SAWBird H1 low noise amplifier/filter, as a method of generating reference samples, and an alternative option to using offset frequency reference samples. The option to do this is in older samples of the barebones SAWBird H1 only according to communications I have received from the company, although a newer sample I purchased did have the feature.
