Ham Radio VHF/UHF & Satellite

FM & repeaters

Scan the band, land on the one that's talking

A multi-channel scanner watches every carrier in a band from one dongle and drops you onto the active one — no round-robin dwell, no missed calls.

2 m & 70 cm FM voice — simplex and repeater output, squelch and gain in reach.
Repeater directory + map layer — see the machines around you and their offsets/tones.
Simultaneous band scanner — an FFT hears all channels at once and locks the live one.

The 2 m band scanner — an FFT watching every channel in the window at once, landed on 146.970 MHz

Digital voice

DMR, Fusion & D-STAR — as voice, not noise

Tune a digital repeater or hotspot and pick the mode — the Pi decodes the vocoder to plain audio in real time, streams the voice to your phone, and pulls the callsign, name, talkgroup and colour code out of the data stream, threading each over into your feed.

DMR, C4FM (Fusion) & D-STAR — decoded voice plus talkgroup, source and colour code.
Right slot, no cross-talk — a two-slot DMR signal plays only the slot you tuned.
Net traffic tagged — decoded calls are labeled with the net and talkgroup in the feed.

The Radio screen decoding DMR digital voice on 433.900 MHz, receiving at SNR 10 dB with 46 overs decoded

The Messages feed of decoded DMR — KD4CIA (Frank), WA1VRP (Richard J), K4NPD (Pete) and AA9FU (Shayne) on talkgroup 3100 with their DMR IDs

Decoded on the dial — DMR voice live off a hotspot on 433.9

New · DMR net finder

Never miss a net that's actually running

Airwave Scan mines BrandMeister to learn which talkgroups host recurring nets and when — then watches them live, so a scheduled slot only lights up when someone is really keyed up.

Recurring nets, discovered — talkgroups that reliably light up at the same weekly time, ranked by activity.
A true LIVE badge — a realtime feed shows the net the instant it keys up, with the current caller — not just "scheduled."
Tap to listen over your hotspot — it links the talkgroup on the correct slot, tunes the scanner and decodes the voice, then unlinks when you leave.

The DMR Nets browser: 44 nets live now with green LIVE badges and callsigns

How reception works — no radio to touch

Tap a net and the app uses your BrandMeister SelfCare key to switch the linked talkgroup on your hotspot remotely, over the internet, on the right timeslot. Your hotspot then puts that traffic on its RF output, and the Pi's DMR decoder listens there in promiscuous mode — decoding whatever's on that slot and talkgroup to voice. Tune away and it unlinks, leaving your hotspot's own static talkgroups untouched.

APRS

Position packets, on the map

Decode the 2 m packet network and watch stations move in real time — including the mobile format most trackers actually send.

Position & MIC-E — fixed and mobile beacons both plotted, not just the easy ones.
Tap for the detail — call, symbol, course, speed and comment.
Balloons too — high-altitude APRS trackers ride the same map layer.

Two decoded APRS stations plotted at street level near Wheaton — N9JPG-7 in West Wheaton and W9TMX-9 by Carol Stream

The same APRS position packets in the Messages feed — N9JPG-7 and W9TMX-9 with decoded coordinates

On the map — decoded APRS stations, street level

Satellites

Know the pass — and follow the bird through it

The Pi runs the orbital math, so you get a real countdown, a live sky picture, and a receiver that chases the Doppler for you.

Pass predictions — what's overhead now and what rises next, in the agenda.
Live sky view — where the satellite is and where it's heading during the pass.
Doppler tuning — the downlink frequency tracks the pass automatically.

Amateur satellite pass predictions with Doppler and elevation

The Radio tab with the ISS sky-view widget above the tuned downlink

The pass — countdown, sky track & Doppler

Antenna rotor

Point the beam at the bird — automatically

Wire an az/el (or azimuth-only) rotator to the Pi through a GS-232 controller like the LVB Tracker, and the app steers your high-gain antennas across the pass while it tunes the downlink — using each rotor's real travel, not hard-coded limits.

Seam-aware tracking — an overlap rotor is sent the long way round when it needs to be, so a pass never drags the cable across the stop mid-track.
Overhead flip — a high pass flips the elevation past 90° so the array follows a bird straight overhead without whipping around in azimuth.
Its real travel, editable in-app — set each rotor's azimuth overlap and elevation range yourself; az/el, or azimuth-only like a Yaesu G-800DXA.
Track & listen — tag which receiver is on the array and tracking tunes that dongle to the target — a satellite, or a balloon from its own GPS.
Point it by hand too — the same card is a live azimuth compass with a draggable target (and an elevation gauge on a dual-axis rotor), so you can swing the beam anywhere yourself.

The rotor control card for a Yaesu G-5500 az/el rotator — a compass dial with the beam pointed to 130° azimuth beside an elevation gauge at 56°, TARGET and NOW both reading 130° · 56°, driven over a GS-232 controller in Manual mode

The same rotor control card adapted for an azimuth-only Yaesu G-800DXA — just the compass dial with the HF beam swung to 130°, no elevation axis, and the config noting 450° azimuth overlap with a dead-zone at 0° north

Az/el, steered live — a G-5500 pointed to 130° and 56° up over GS-232

Unattended capture

Arm a pass, walk away — the Pi records it for you

The station is a radio DVR. Point it at anything in the agenda — a satellite pass, a weather-fax chart, a balloon launch — and the Pi wakes at the scheduled time, captures it on its own, and drops the result in your Messages feed. You don't have to be home, or awake.

Scheduled from the agenda — arm an upcoming pass or broadcast and the Pi handles the timing from the orbital math, tracking the rotor and chasing the Doppler as it runs.
Any downlink — a Meteor weather image, a radiosonde flight, an SSTV or APRS pass, or a plain voice recording.
Result in Messages — the decoded picture, telemetry or audio clip is waiting when it finishes, tagged with the pass and date.

The Coming-up agenda's Scheduled captures section with four armed passes queued for unattended capture — Meteor-M2 4 (in 4h 22m, 12° peak), FO-29, the Davenport radiosonde launch, and Meteor-M2 3 (in 11h 18m, 26°) — each marked ARMED, above the note that armed items are captured unattended at their time and land in Messages

Recordings

Every voice pass, saved — with a waveform and a transcript

When the Pi records a voice pass — the ISS repeater, an FM bird, or any frequency you point it at — it lands in Messages as a clip you can work with, not just a file on a card.

Scrub the waveform — the whole pass at a glance, so you can drag straight to where the voices are.
Skip the silence — jump the dead air between overs and hear only the traffic.
Transcribed on-device — a text transcript is generated on your phone, with callsigns picked out of the audio.

The Recordings player card in the app — a captured ISS pass on 437.800 MHz with a voice-activity waveform scrubber (9:46 of 10:00 is voice), a Skip-silence toggle, and one-tap DeepFilterNet denoise and on-device Transcribe

Repeaters, digital voice,
and birds overhead.

Scan the band, land on the one that's talking