Amateur radio, RF intelligence, and a lab that never sleeps.
listening to the invisible — decoding it — and hosting it all myself.
Amateur Radio Station · Self-Hosted · Ohio, USAThe air is full of signals — aircraft, satellites, public-safety radio, weather, and a hundred kinds of chatter most people never notice. This station receives them, decodes them, and puts them on a screen. A few of the tools built along the way are free for the whole radio community.
A licensed ham station — repeaters, digital-voice linking, and weak-signal digital modes like FT8. Part of the linked network that keeps operators talking across town and across the country.
Software-defined radios feeding live decoders: aircraft overhead, geostationary weather-satellite imagery pulled straight from space, and trunked public-safety scanner audio — all self-received, all local.
Free, fast callbooks built on the full FCC license database plus world call data — no ads, no paywall. Look up any operator, license, or club and see the parts other sites miss.
Everything here runs on a self-hosted cluster at home — no cloud landlords. Radios, decoders, databases, dashboards, and the network gluing multiple sites together, all owned and operated in-house.
It starts at the antenna. Software-defined radios turn raw radio spectrum into data, and a stack of decoders makes sense of it — ADS-B from aircraft transponders, LRIT/HRIT imagery from geostationary weather satellites, P25 trunked public-safety systems, and the digital-voice modes hams use every day.
All of it runs on a self-hosted Proxmox cluster — a handful of nodes running virtual machines and containers. A WireGuard mesh links remote receive sites back home, and a reverse proxy with wildcard TLS puts a clean, secure front on every service. If it has a login, it's mine; if it's public, it's here on purpose.
Radio is infrastructure hiding in plain sight. Learning to hear it, decode it, and explain it is equal parts engineering, curiosity, and public service — the same instinct that put a ham license in my pocket in the first place.
And it's all self-hosted on purpose. Owning the hardware, the data, and the code means nothing gets rate-limited, sold, or shut off by someone else's business decision. It's a lab to learn in, break things in, and keep.
When something built here turns out to be useful — a faster callbook, a cleaner license lookup — it goes back to the amateur radio community for free. That's the deal ham radio runs on: you learn, you build, you give it back.
73 — and thanks for stopping by.
"You learn something, you build something, and then you hand it forward. That's rent for living in a hobby this good."
Read the log →These run live on this station's own receivers and servers. Public, no login.