IEEE Spectrum magazine (July 2013)

There's a more informative (if less elegant) article on the same subject here:

The tuners are still very much in production, it would be interesting to know what proportion of them are being bought as wideband receivers rather than merely for TV.

It is not really "an old television tuner". Under that title I expected a tin can that mixes VHF/UHF signals to an intermediate frequency or at best baseband video. That is not what this USB stick is.

Indeed, it would be interesting to know if there are many of those used as a wideband receiver. If so, it could be considered to develop and produce one that is more suited to this task. (with more bits on the A/D converter, that is)

Of course the "funcube dongle" already exists.

The greater dynamic range would certainly be useful. Mixing products from local 136MHz and 153MHz transmitters are very noticeable on the 2m band for example, but aside from that the one I have here hears not much less than my dedicated 2m transceiver.

There's some interesting software for processing and streaming audio (radio) signals here:

And very nice it looks from the specs, as it should at 15x the price of RTL sticks.

Yes, it is a pity that it is only 8-bit, otherwise it is a nice trick.

It was designed before the DVB stick method became known, otherwise it probably would not have existed. The main difference is that it has a lower sampling frequency (thus smaller bandwidth of waterfall display and widest signal that can be demodulated), but it has better A/D. The newer + model also has filters, improving the performance in the presence of large signals.

Of couse this all adds to the cost. And a mass-produced consumer item from China is always less expensive than a custom design with lower production. Although the Pi shows that low cost is still possible.

Using the Raspberry Pi and a TV receiver stick to show aircraft positions:

(with apologies for the missing 3rd-party animated image).