Airwave Scan turns a Raspberry Pi and a low-cost RTL-SDR into a location-aware scanner you drive from your iPhone — a live map, 30+ digital decoders, a DMR net finder, and real HF propagation.
On Air — live nets, passes & DX, soonest first
From listening to your local fire dispatch to catching a DMR net the moment someone keys up — Airwave Scan does it from the driver's seat.
As you travel, it surfaces nearby public-safety, weather, marine, aviation and ham channels from a cloud catalog of 20,000+ frequencies — then scans the ones that are actually live.
Stream live audio to your iPhone over your home network, your car hotspot, or a secure link from across the country — with a CarPlay-native interface and low-latency Opus.
Aircraft (ADS-B), ships (AIS + DSC), ACARS/VDL2, DMR & digital voice, FT8/FT4/JS8/WSPR, CW/RTTY/PSK31, NAVTEX, 406 MHz beacons, train & meter telemetry, weather alerts & balloons — decoded on the Pi in real time.
Planes, boats, APRS stations, weather balloons and HF beacons plotted together — colored by signal strength, with grid, grayline, MUF and repeater overlays. Tap any track for the details.
A one-tap FT8 sweep band-hops all of HF and reports, in plain English, which bands are open and to where — cross-checked against live DX cluster spots.
A single time-ordered feed of what's about to happen: satellite passes, DMR nets, contests, POTA/SOTA activations, shortwave broadcasts and weather-fax charts — each a tap to tune.
It mines BrandMeister to learn which talkgroups run recurring nets, shows a live badge the instant one keys up, and links the net to your hotspot so you hear it — one tap, right slot.
A full noise-reduction suite — spectral, RNNoise, DeepFilterNet, libSpecBleach and a noise blanker — plus wide "hi-fi" eSSB and one-tap recording to a shareable file.
Decode SSTV images and shortwave Weather Fax charts as they paint, line by line — and save them straight to your Photos.
The same scanner, focused on what you chase. Each guide goes deep on the features, modes and screens for that world.
FT8 & the weak-signal modes, live propagation, DX spots, weather fax, SSTV, a logbook, and a noise-reduction stack for the low bands.
Open guide2 m/70 cm FM & repeaters, APRS, DMR/Fusion/D-STAR, the DMR net finder, and satellite passes with a sky view and live Doppler.
Open guideTrack aircraft with ADS-B, read ACARS & VDL Mode 2 datalink, and tune the air-band voice for towers, approach and center.
Open guideFollow vessels with AIS, catch DSC distress and NAVTEX, watch 406 MHz EPIRBs, and tune marine VHF and the NOAA weather channels.
Open guideNOAA Weather Radio and decoded SAME alerts for your county, HF weather-fax charts, and radiosonde balloons plotted as they climb.
Open guideYour town's fire, EMS and local-government dispatch on conventional channels — location-aware, receive-only, with paging decode.
Open guideWhich Raspberry Pi, which SDR dongles, antennas, upconverters and filters — a plain-English parts guide to put real signal into the app.
A small always-on radio does the RF. Your phone orchestrates. The cloud knows what's broadcasting where.
A pocket-sized edge box tunes the airwaves and runs every decoder on-device — no cloud round-trip for the RF.
The orchestrator: it draws the map, plays the audio, and tells the Pi what to tune and decode — online or fully offline.
A location-indexed catalog of what's on the air — aviation, weather, marine and ham — provided from the cloud and cached on your phone for the road.
The cloud catalog and the on-device decoders line up behind the things people actually listen for.
It all runs over wireless CarPlay — glanceable and driver-safe, tuned from the wheel. The Pi does the receiving at home or in the trunk; the dash just shows what's on the air.
Now playing, plus a live sky — NOAA Weather Radio on 162.425 with a 150 nm aircraft radar, 65 contacts overhead
Flash the edge software onto a Raspberry Pi, plug in an RTL-SDR, pair your phone by QR — and the airwaves around you light up. The iOS app rounds out a private beta.
Raspberry Pi 4/5 · RTL-SDR (RTL2832U) · iPhone on iOS 16+