A real receiver: the server sends compressed IQ and your browser does
the demodulation. Everything below is a gesture that isn't obvious from
looking at it.
Tuning
- Click the spectrum or waterfall
- tunes there
- Drag sideways
- slides the tuning across the band
- ◀ ▶ beside the frequency
- steps one notch; hold to run. Arrow keys do the same
- The size between them
- click to change the step — the last position is LOCK, which freezes tuning so you can't nudge it by accident
- Scroll a digit in the big frequency
- steps that digit up or down
- Drag the frequency scale
- pans the view; ZOOM and full span are on the right
Hearing it
- ⏻ start
- starts the streams and the sound — browsers won't play audio without a click
- USB / LSB / CW / AM / NFM / WFM
- demodulator; USB suits most narrow signals
- BW
- how wide a slice is demodulated, in Hz
- squelch
- mutes anything weaker than the threshold
Seeing it
- ⇱ auto scale
- fits the display to the signal — turns red when nothing is on scale
- Drag up or down on the waterfall
- sets the reference level by hand
- Drag a small panel up or down
- same, for that panel alone; double-click to clear it
- REF and SCALE
- top of the range, and dB per division
- PEAK, AVG
- hold the peaks, or smooth the trace
Decoding FT8
- FT8
- decodes every station in the passband at once and lists them. Press it again for FT4 — the panel title tells you which is running
- Where to point it
- 14.074 on 20 m, 7.074 on 40 m. FT4 lives at 14.080 and 7.0475
- Each line
- time · signal-to-noise in dB · timing offset · audio frequency · message. Click one to tune it
- CQ only
- hides everything except stations calling — the ones you could answer. CQs are green either way
- No sound needed
- it decodes off the IQ stream whether or not you've pressed start
Under the hood
- IQ bits
- mantissa bits per sample — drop it and watch the noise floor rise
- ⏻ on / off
- stops your own streams and audio; other listeners are unaffected
- gaps
- dropped blocks; should stay at zero
- snapshot
- saves the display as a PNG