Listening quick-start (sdroxide — shortwave & broadcast)
A short, task-oriented walkthrough for using sdroxide as a listener:
browse the broadcast schedule, tune longwave, medium wave and shortwave, log
what you hear and send a reception report. Nothing here needs a licence or a
transmitter — the listener’s screen is a clean receiver by design. For the
reference detail behind each control see USER_MANUAL.md; for
the why of this fork see the README.
This is the CB/SWL fork of sdroxide. The listening tools are added on top of
the amateur program; the amateur side, and everything else, is upstream and
unchanged.
Nederlands: listening-quickstart.nl.md. Français:
listening-quickstart.fr.md. Italiano:
listening-quickstart.it.md. PDF:
listening-quickstart.en.pdf.
Bold names such as SETTINGS and SWL LOG are buttons and fields exactly as
they appear on screen. Settings > Radio is a menu path.
What you need
- An SDR or a radio sdroxide supports. Any of them will do; for listening the
usual choices are:
- RTL-SDR (dongle) — native, no SoapySDR needed.
- RX-888 / RX-888 Mk2 — native; the firmware is uploaded automatically.
- Airspy HF+ (Dual / Discovery / Ranger) — native, 0.5 kHz–31 MHz.
- A receive-only receiver such as the ATS Mini (an ESP32 + Si4732) —
the computer tunes it and demodulates nothing itself; the audio comes back
through a sound card.
- Also possible: HackRF, Airspy R2/Mini, SDRplay RSP, ELAD, PlutoSDR, or a
CAT rig over a serial port + sound card, TCI, OpenHPSDR, or SoapySDR.
- An antenna. For shortwave even a long wire works wonders; a broadcast band
wants more wire than an 11 m whip.
- sdroxide installed (below).
Installing
- Windows — the installer (
.msi) or the portable .zip: see the
Releases page.
- Linux — the AppImage (one file,
chmod +x and run), the .deb, or
the portable tarball.
- macOS — the
.dmg.
You can also run sdroxide as a server and open it in a browser:
sdroxide --server, then http://localhost:4950.
Part A — One-time setup
Everything here is saved under ~/.config/sdroxide-brown/, so you do it once.
1. Pick your radio
Open SETTINGS and go to the Radio tab. Pick your interface, the
sample rate and the gain. Changes apply right after Apply / reconnect.
An ATS Mini is chosen here too, as a receive-only source.
2. Turn on the listener’s screen
Settings > Radio > Transmit controls > SWL mode hides every transmit
control — PTT, TUNE, CALL CQ and the rest — and swaps the ham chips for the
listener’s (SCHEDULE, SWL LOG). It is set per radio, so a listening
set and a transceiver can sit side by side. Settings > UI > Start in SWL mode,
or --swl on the command line, makes every radio a listener. A receive-only
radio (a public SDR, an RTL-SDR) is offered Listening controls in its warning
banner, which does the same.
3. Fill in your details
Go to the General tab:
- Locator / grid — your Maidenhead grid. The SWL LOG window pre-fills each
reception’s locator from it.
- IARU region — the region that sets the band plan.
- On the Spots tab, Report as (SWL) — the identity that signs your
reception reports and the PSK Reporter/WSPR uploads. It is separate from any
callsign on purpose: it is never keyed, logged or spotted.
Part B — Listening
- Pick a broadcast band on the band bar: LW, MW, SW or FM — or
AIR and MIL for the civil and military airbands.
- On shortwave the metre band is named —
SW 49m · AM — and offered as a
shortcut, so you can jump to a broadcast band’s slice directly.
- Pick the mode: AM for the broadcast bands, SAM for synchronous AM,
WFM for FM broadcast.
- ECSS. On SAM, the ECSS-U and ECSS-L presets keep one sideband
and reject the other — the medium-wave DX trick for ducking an adjacent
channel.
- Tone. The SWL LOG window’s Tone row shelves the bass, mid and treble of
the demodulated audio, in front of the speakers. Broadcast audio wants a tone
control the ham speech chain never needed.
- Missed something? REPLAY plays the last two minutes instead of live —
catch the station id you just heard.
Part C — The broadcast schedule
The SCHEDULE window is the listener’s worklist: it turns the same EiBi
schedule that labels the waterfall into a table of about 4,600 broadcast
transmissions. Filter it by a UTC time (or now), free text, language,
target and a metre band, and star the ones you follow with ★ FAVS.
A row can be TUNEd — the same tune as clicking its label on the waterfall —
or LOGged straight into the reception log with the station, language and
transmitter site already filled in. SOLAR TIME puts each row’s local time at
the transmitter beside its site.
Part D — The reception log (SWL LOG)
The SWL LOG window is your record of what was heard:
- + NEW logs the station the receiver is on right now, with the live
frequency, mode and S-meter reading; LOG on a SCHEDULE row fills in the
rest. The entry form holds the station, frequency, mode, language, the
SINPO or SIO figures, and your notes.
- Antenna — the aerial in use, in your own words (“Longwire 20 m”, “MLA-30
loop”). Set it once; each reception captures it.
- REPORT writes the selected reception out as a text report to send to the
broadcaster — the numbers, the received-at locator and the aerial, signed
with your report identity and naming the program sdroxide_SWL.
- report sent and QSL received track the whole loop, hear → report →
await QSL: REPORT stamps the first, and a small sent or QSL mark
on the row shows how far each catch has got.
- rcl on a row tunes back to that reception’s frequency and mode in one
click, to check whether the station has returned.
- Pirate marks an unlicensed broadcast; the row wears a Jolly Roger.
- Show filters the list by free text, band and day, with a
Pirates only switch. CSV and ADIF save the whole log — the ADIF as
reception records, not contacts.
- SIG ID names what is on the dial, ranked against the mode, frequency, band
and passband from a built-in catalogue of ~60 signals, with a sigidwiki
link for the sample.
- JOBS records a band on a timer — leave it running and come back to files
named by UTC, frequency and mode.
- Scanning sweeps a band and names what it stops on.
- Broadcast and utility labels — EiBi transmitters, time signals, VOLMET and
the rest — are drawn on the waterfall and on the panadapter.
Help and links
Good listening, and good DX! 73