You can also just go to http://websdr.org and select from a bunch of other servers.
Basically, the site is an SDR with a web interface. You're able to go there and listen to the radio. It is, obviously, RX only. Still, you can go there and listen to the ham radio enthusiasts across the world.
I should warn you, it is quite a time sink. Not everything is in morse code. You can stumble across some interesting stuff and it is fun just playing with the buttons.
If you've wondered what ham is all about and haven't bothered to get your license, this is a great way to experience the monitoring aspect of being a radio operator. If you're anything like me, it will eat up more time than you'd care to admit.
Still, it is an SDR that you can actually play with to see if you're interested in learning more about it.
I just want to caution folks about visiting this site. You could find yourself getting sucked into a years-long obsession with RF and software defined radios. Pretty soon you'll have dozens of RTL SDRs strewn about your desk, coax tumbleweed snaring your feet and six iterations of a quarter-wave ground plane that still don't work quite as well as the first one you ever built.
That site is really awesome, I've spent a lot of time there as well (for those interested, check out the "Chatbox" tab, where users share stations/frequencies).
Do you think that it would be useful to have an in-browser audio decoding of signals, i.e. support for various digital mode, as fldigi [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fldigi] does?
Tune in to a station, and see the morse output right in the browser..?
Absolutely. I'd also like to see an attempt to translate the output to the user's native language.
What I'm not sure of is if the signal will always be good enough to decode it. In fact, I suspect it won't always be good enough to decode it automatically.
Obviously, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good and it should just fail gracefully when the signal is degraded too much.
But, it potentially becomes a support nightmare. While we may know that the trouble is the signal degradation, I suspect many people wouldn't and they would try to place blame on the developers. It may make identification of actual software problems more difficult to assess.
Still, I say it would be a 'killer feature.' I have pondered it before but I'm not a very good programmer. I am pretty sure that some of them would happily add it right to their site, should someone make it. There are a lot of great features that could be added along with it - such as outputting it to a chat room that was dynamically created for that specific frequency. It could even be tied into a social function where a group of people might select to all move to a different frequency together and it, the decoding software, would follow them along. Perhaps the channel could monitor multiple less-active frequencies. That sort of stuff.
I think it would be a wonderful idea and think that good is just fine, and that I'd not expect perfection.
That said, I'm glad I'm not the only one that finds the place to be a time sink. I've spent more hours there than I care to admit. I favor the site that I linked directly, but that is mostly because that is the one I discovered first.
Depending on where you live, you can possibly also find local feeds from people's scanners. You can listen to the emergency responders, police, and things like that. It's not quite the same, but it is similar enough to where I figure I'll mention it. I don't usually bother with it, because I have a nice scanner already set up. Still, it is pretty fun. Also, if there is some sort of major event, you can go listen and hear what is going on before it is covered on the news. That's always fun.
Though there is also OpenWebRX at http://sdr.hu/openwebrx, which does essentially the same thing but is more open source. It has some decoder plugins already.
You can use an audio pipe to decode signals with fldigi, however the occasional stuttering of the audio can mess up the decoding. It works better to use the record feature, then download the file and decode the audio from that. I've done Morse and rtty and psk and even some hamdrm and sstv images through the websdrs.
It's on sdr.hu. I'll only do morse decoding the old fashioned way. That being said, things like CW skimmer are pretty amazing. I have a Flex-6500 and several Ettus SDR hardware, so don't use the Kiwi much.
I can understand that, and you're welcome. And I did warn you about it eating up your time. Before you know it, the dog has forgotten his name and your spouse has gone to Baja Mexico.
Meh, it's probably worth it.
Do not click the second link. No, don't do that. The second link is an index of other online SDRs. There are quite a few others and they are geographically disparate and offer different frequencies. Do not click that link! Do not bookmark that link! It is very, very bad for you.
I haven't tested these, but someone down the thread linked to some other software. By following that link, I found another site. That site, being evil, is an index for more online SDRs that use the other software.
You definitely don't want to click this link either:
I am going to make some lunch and then click that link. I'll do it so that you don't have to. I want to see what those radios offer and I want to see how well the software functions.
Remember, don't click the second link in my original post. In fact, you should probably burn your computer to the ground, it's the only way to be sure.
It really is addictive. It's a great way to experience part of what it's like to be a ham radio operator. Pretty soon, you'll be over at one of the ARRL sites, taking the practice exams, and applying for a test date.
Why yes, yes those keywords are unintentional. I wouldn't want you to go searching and find a new hobby, or anything like that.
chuckles
I'd get a license but I'm happy just listening. It's already a time sink. I can't imagine what it would do to my free time if I actually had a way to respond.
Some of them do crazy stuff like use the moon for signal propagation... I'm not kidding. They will intentionally bounce signals off the moon, and do it successfully, to do two way communication. It's so common, they have a on acronym for it. They call it EME, Earth Moon Earth. Sometimes, they do it off Venus.
So, once you get the bug you can kiss your free time goodbye. But, you'll have a lot of new friends and be able to do cool stuff - including helping out in emergencies. Hams only provide communications, not actual rescues or anything.
Don't worry, you'll learn all about it when you join your local radio club. It's destiny, you might as well not fight it.
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
You can also just go to http://websdr.org and select from a bunch of other servers.
Basically, the site is an SDR with a web interface. You're able to go there and listen to the radio. It is, obviously, RX only. Still, you can go there and listen to the ham radio enthusiasts across the world.
I should warn you, it is quite a time sink. Not everything is in morse code. You can stumble across some interesting stuff and it is fun just playing with the buttons.
If you've wondered what ham is all about and haven't bothered to get your license, this is a great way to experience the monitoring aspect of being a radio operator. If you're anything like me, it will eat up more time than you'd care to admit.
Still, it is an SDR that you can actually play with to see if you're interested in learning more about it.