HAM RADIO

A receiver you can listen to

Here I will try to activate an SDR to monitor the 2 metre ham radio band in the Riyadh area, and broadcast FM. Right now this is limited to what I am monitoring, but hopefully in a few weeks a full SDR will be available to allow you to use it yourself.

Everything else on this site is recovered from somewhere. This page is not. The receiver is running now, on a roof in Riyadh, and what you hear is what is on the air at the moment you press play.

It is receive only. Nothing on this page reaches a transmitter, and nothing you do here puts a signal on the air. The stream runs about fifteen to thirty seconds behind me, because the encoder, the server and your browser each hold a little of it.

What it is not, yet. It is not a WebSDR. There is no waterfall and you cannot tune it. The receiver sits where I put it, and when the station is off the stream is off. The sign above says so, rather than leave you listening to silence and wondering.

What is doing the listening

⚠ THE MONITORING LINE IS TYPED BY HAND. Nothing in the stream reports what the radio is tuned to, so if I retune and forget to change it, this page is wrong until I fix it. Read it as where the receiver usually sits, not where it certainly is. The X510 is a vertical for 2 m and 70 cm; it hears other things, because every antenna does, but it is not cut for them and nothing here is a claim about coverage outside the amateur bands.

The rest of the station

The station keeps its own site at hp84.com, which is where the stream is served from and where the packet material lives: the node on 144.850 MHz, the bulletin board behind it, and how to reach both by radio rather than by browser. It is also a Gopher hole on port 70, for the same reason the rest of this site exists.

There is a satellite ground station too, logging telemetry from low orbit: Telemetry Node 7Z1FP.

A licence is a small thing to get, and it puts you on the air with people who built all of this before there was a web to put it on.