Kristian Glass - Do I Smell Burning?

Mostly technical things

OpenWebRX - Easy remote SDR receiving

I have a number of Software Defined Radios (SDRs), ranging from cheap RTL-SDR dongles originally designed to receive TV, to the much fancier Hermes Lite 2 transceiver.

OpenWebRX is powerful yet easy-to-use remote SDR receiving software, that you can operate from a browser. It’s designed for people to offer radios to a wider audience over the internet. For me, it’s valuable on my local network.

I don’t really have the space or the desire to have a radio and antenna operating indoors. I do have space in the garage. I could manually deploy something like rtl_tcp and hand-configure things for remote operation, but OpenWebRX wraps everything I want in an easy-to-deploy application, and saves me a whole bunch of work.

Additionally, it supports a wide range of hardware straight out of the box. This was particularly valuable to me after I received an SDRPlay RSP1A as a gift from my dad - a really nice piece of hardware, but a bit of a pain in terms of drivers and software support. OpenWebRX handles it nicely.

I started running the OpenWebRX Docker image on a low-powered NUC, before moving to the prebuilt Raspberry Pi images on a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Currently I’m running a dedicated node monitoring FT8 traffic across 10/20/40/80/160m, uploading spots to PSKReporter.

My OpenWebRX configuration is available on GitHub, and you can see what I’ve received on PSKReporter.

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