Experiments with OpenWebRX and Airspy HF+

This week I've been experimenting with sharing my Airspy HF+ over the internet using the excellent, open source, OpenWebRX. Here's how 40m looks through a web browser.

I'm running it on a ThinkPad x230 running Ubuntu 19.04. I got the source code from GitHub and followed these instructions to build the app needed to use the Airspy HF+.

I was expecting it to have all the features seen in the KiwiSDR receivers, but that's not the case. There are 147 forks of the original software, which was part of an academic project.

The first thing that users find frustrating with the original version is that you must tune using the mouse to drag the tuning indicator. Because of the long delay (the buffer time is 2 seconds by default) it's difficult to tune in sideband. There is at least one fork with an open pull request that adds keyboard commands to nudge tuning up and down and the KiwiSDR variant also lets you enter frequencies directly.

It's great that there are increasing numbers of web accessible receivers available. In these times of high noise levels in the cities it can be practical to have a contact by transmitting from home and receiving via a remote receiver.