EasySpotter

A receiving station in one program. Plug in an SDR, pick your bands, and EasySpotter decodes FT8, FT4, JS8, WSPR and JTTY on all of them at once, maps the openings live, reads RTTY, Olivia, PSK and CW on their known frequencies, saves weather-fax charts and SSTV pictures, listens with a waterfall and, if you like, shares the receiver on the web. Free, for Linux and Windows.

Download EasySpotter Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux and Windows

EasySpotter's Live Map tab: ten minutes of spots from a station in North Carolina on a world map, dots coloured by band, with the openings to Europe, Japan, the Caribbean and South America outlined in each band's colour and a time slider over the day's spots-per-hour graph
Live Map: ten minutes of spots on a world map, dots and openings coloured by band. Drag the two ends of the slider to see any stretch of the last 24 hours.
EasySpotter's Live FT8 tab: one RX-888 MKII decoding eleven bands, 160 m through 6 m, with a spots-per-hour graph for each over six hours
Live FT8: one RX-888 MKII on eleven bands, with spots per hour for each over 1, 6 or 24 hours.
The Stats tab: band activity by hour for the last seven days with sunrise and sunset, total spots per hour over the week, and today's totals by band, by mode and by station
Stats: seven days of band activity by hour with daylight, the total spots per hour, and today's counts by band, mode and station.
The Modes / Frequencies tab: the receivers found, the FT8, FT4, WSPR and JS8 intervals, the keyboard modes to watch and a tick box per band
Pick the receiver, the modes and the bands; EasySpotter places them.
The Sharing tab: the station on the air with EasySDR, listener limits, session length and the modes listeners may choose
Sharing: the same receivers on the web with EasySDR, with your own limits.

What it does

  • Decodes FT8, FT4, JS8, WSPR and JTTY on many bands at once from one receiver. An RX-888 MKII hears all of HF, 160 m through 10 m, in a single capture; an SDRplay RSP or an RTL-SDR dongle covers the bands that fit its passband.
  • Shows the activity live: a world map of the stations heard with the openings outlined band by band for any stretch of the last 24 hours, a card per band, spot-rate graphs with each band's peak, a seven-day band-by-hour map with daylight, countries heard and the farthest station.
  • Reports spots to PSK Reporter and WSPR to WSPRnet when you switch it on, with duplicates filtered across receivers. Reporting is off until you enter your callsign and grid.
  • Decodes JTTY, the new keyboard mode in WSJT-X 3.3, and reports its callsigns to PSK Reporter alongside the FT8 spots.
  • Watches the known keyboard-mode frequencies for RTTY, Olivia, PSK31, PSK63 and CW, and shows every callsign heard on the Live Text Modes tab.
  • Saves weather-fax charts (WEFAX) and SSTV pictures as they arrive, each captioned with the transmitter, the frequency and the time, on the Live Images tab.
  • Listens in USB, LSB, AM and FM with a waterfall, to your speakers or to a virtual audio input for WSJT-X, fldigi or any other decoder.
  • Includes EasySDR: the same receivers can be heard on the web by anyone with a browser, listed on the W2JKT station directory. Sharing is a switch on the Sharing tab.
  • Runs the receivers at boot with no one logged in, if you want a station that is always on watch.

Get EasySpotter

Free for Linux and Windows — packages for Ubuntu and Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux and Windows, with install steps, are on the download page.

Download EasySpotter The download page also lists EasySDR, for sharing a receiver without the spotting.