I just tried out FT8 and WOW i do not understand why it is so popular. In JS8 you can at least have conversations and do fun things like relay and message storage but FT8 just has a predefined script.
And thats it.
Does it not get boring?
Been working on this project last few weeks. Setup at my parents house in Hull, MA: Retevis MA06 marine antenna in a window facing Boston Harbor → RTL-SDR → Pi 4 running rtl_airband. The entire US marine band is only ~1.4 MHz wide, so one dongle grabs the whole thing in a single window and rtl_airband demods every channel in parallel 16 labeled Icecast streams instead of one scanner hopping around and missing half of everything.
From there each stream ships to a backend that runs speech-to-text on all of it, and an LLM sorts a day of radio into the ~5 minutes actually worth hearing. Marine VHF is dead boring until it very suddenly isn't. Week one my node caught a 29ft Cobalt with 7 people aboard taking on water calling Sector Boston on 16. Whole exchange, start to rescue. I put a replay on the site with captions synced to the chart - docktalk.app, scroll to the demo phone.
The ask: Boston works, I want 5 harbors before the iOS app ships. If you have line of sight to a busy harbor, the install is now one curl command with a claim code it pulls your harbor's channel plan and you show up on the leaderboard at docktalk.app within a minute. ~$165 in parts, ~$112 if you have a spare Pi (any Debian box works honestly), and if your spot is genuinely good I'll just ship you the kit free. Hosts get the app's premium tier free for as long as the node runs + credit on everything their box hears first.
Straight up since it always comes up: this is a company I'm building, not an open-data project audio goes to our network only. If that's a dealbreaker, all good. If you already feed aisstream/FR24/MarineTraffic, this doesn't touch your existing setup, it's one more dongle to your existing set up!
RX only, public unencrypted spectrum, same legal footing scanner feeds and LiveATC have been on for 20+ years.
Happy to go deep on the RF chain, rtl_airband config, or the ASR pipeline in comments.
Once I get 5 harbors covered I'll launch the iOS app!!
ay guys! i found this transmission, it seems to be kids transmitting with something on the spanish military band, this happened in Cantabria at 14:05 near Santander
i guess this is illegal right? will it be worth it to triangulate the location and try to alert the parent about it? There seems to be military activity right now with planes flying around here lol
A few months ago I realized the thing keeping me off the air wasn't the radio, it was being chained to the shack PC and software that looks like a VB6 app. So I built ShackNerd: a single small program that runs on the shack computer and turns every browser on your network into the radio:
What works today, all verified on the air with my 7300 MK2:
Spectrum and waterfall over the radio's Ethernet port, way faster than USB CAT can deliver
Full control: tuning that behaves like a real VFO knob on a phone screen, band memory, split, filters
Receive AND transmit audio. I checked into my local net from the couch on my phone. PTT has a watchdog so a dropped connection can never leave you keyed.
CW keyer with macros plus a decoder that I tuned against real off-air signals
FT8 through WSJT-X (it serves rigctld, so your digital software just points at it)
QSO log with ADIF export, and RBN spotting so a CQ shows you where you were heard
Remote operation over Tailscale with password sign-in and one-click HTTPS
The part that might interest this sub even if you never run it: Icom never documented how the network port works, so I wrote it down while building this. The handshake, login, audio streams, retransmission layer, all of it is published under CC BY 4.0 at shacknerd.com for any project to use, any license. And to be clear about the neighbors: wfview is a mature open source client for these radios and it's excellent. My provenance notes credit everything I studied. If you want free and open source desktop software, use wfview.
Honest status: this is early software, built by one ham, fully tested against exactly one radio. Which is where you come in. If you own an IC-705, 7610, or 9700, ShackNerd has a one-click "radio report" in Settings: a read-only snapshot of how your radio describes itself. It transmits nothing and changes nothing. One emailed file is most of what I need to support your model.
Free early access at shacknerd.com. I'll be in the comments all day.
73, W2NRD
I am looking to gain access to at least the 20m and 40m bands.
My backyard is about 65 ft by 65 ft. The orange dot is where I have a feed line coming out of the house. Currently I have a 40m ham stick painted gray, on the PVC greenhouse(white circle) doesn't work really well. Structure has power and is ~9 feet tall, all plastic. Between the orange dot and green dot is an underground conduit 1 1/2 size. The dots around the yard are small fruit trees about 7 foot lollipops.
I have a 20 meter dipole and a 2m jpole in the attic. The dipole has a lot of qrm out the radio, I seldom can hear anyone.
This is a new neighborhood and we just avoided having to create an HOA so I don't want to give the neighbors any reasons to be mad.
49 down, 1 to go. Deleware is killing me! Last one I need to get.
Any tips/gotchas for flying (domestic and international) with a radio? Just a handheld at this point but maybe something bigger in the future.
The suggestions I took were: get a NanoVNA, eliminate the parallel feedline I had going on, and change the brackets from metal to plastic (3D printed).
I have wanted a simple view of POTA and SOTA maps, in one place, but never found something that worked for me.
So I build and released a free iOS and Android app called ScoutCAT to see all the entities near you, or on your roadtrip, and when they’ve been activated last.
You can also see if an entity hasn’t been activated on a certain band or mode.
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoutcat-pota-sota-map/id6795701085
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.potacat.scoutcat&hl=en\_US
Website: https://potacat.com/scoutcat
If you run into any bugs, please report them on Discord: https://potacat.com/discord in the #scoutcat channel
I activated all 221 POTA references in Texas—and then learned the award for doing it hadn’t been made yet.
So I made my own. And a country song to go with it.
Deer, bats, boats, rattlesnakes, breakdowns and a whole lot of QSOs.
FoxSDR a new SDR receiver for Windows, built from scratch in a clean-room environment
I've been building Fox SDR, a from-the-ground-up SDR receiver app for Windows. It's a complete clean-room implementation no cde read from or derived from any existing SDR project (SDR++, GQRX, etc.), everything written fresh from published specs and standards, with permissively-licensed dependencies only.
Features so far:
Links:
I recently bought a used Xiegu G99 and was thinking about updating the firmware but got a little nervous when I saw the USB to 3.5mm cable to run the update. Is it fairly safe, I don’t want to brick a new to me radio? What are others experiences?
I get how TDMA works but I'm just curious how they clock the two timeslots. I assume it's not like FT8 that just uses an actual clock since a lot of radios don't have clocks. I assume there's not necessarily a master pulse since even with a repeater there's no signal unless it's keyed up.
Is it just internally clocked starting on whenever the first packet gets sent and that's close enough for everything to stay synced well enough?
I use to jse an CB back in the 90s. I recently got a GMRs and its pretty decent. I been thinking about getting into HAM and been doing flash cards and practice tests from website for HAM but i.am not part of any club and basically doing it on my own. Is it worth be getting into it by myself?
I am testing New software for Android, name is qFT8 , running verry well, 73 de Laurent on2vhf jo20el
Hey everyone! Here’s my EDC as a passionate ham!
List:
BTech UV PRO
POM pepper stream
Keys: airtag, keys, gerber pocket clip
Open Sea Leather topsider LT
Olight baton 4
Zippo 1941 replica copper
Benchmade Bailout
Knipex XS
I carry many radios and knives as you guys know. Lately I decided to figure out my most used tool on my Leatherman ARC edc: Knife and pliers- So I decided to just carry a pocket knife and pliers and so far it’s not left me short once. (I keep a MT and complete toolkit in my car) And occasionally I carry my gun but lately I haven’t felt the need to.
Any other Amateur radio operators also into edc?