There are all sorts of interesting and useful things you can do with them: monitor/troubleshoot various AM devices around the house (weather stations, garage do

There are all sorts of interesting and useful things you can do with them: monitor/troubleshoot various AM devices around the house (weather stations, garage door openers etc), tune in to a number of amateur radio bands (there's surprising amount of traffic on them), receive NOAA weather broadcasts, aircraft broadcasts, debug DIY projects (433MHz transmitters etc.)... there's a lot of stuff being broadcast in the frequencies that these dongles can receive. You just need a decent antenna[1] and to explore the spectrum around you a bit. Granted, the absolute most common cases are out of reach with the cheap dongles due to frequency, bandwidth and encryption issues (i.e. ATSC, Wifi, Bluetooth) So they're not going to be terribly interesting to the average consumer but they are very handy little devices for hackers with any interest in RF. [1] The default antennas they ship are not useful over a wide range of frequencies and/or for weak signals