Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the things about amateur radio that I find intensely fascinating and to be honest sometimes just as frustrating, is that you don't know what the outcome of an experiment might be at any one time. Not because you cannot control the experiment, or because you don't know what you're doing, but because the number of variables involved in most meaningful amateur radio experiments is pretty much infinite. I've spoken about this before, the idea that if you were to make a simple dipole antenna and fold the ends on each other, you'd have infinite variation in antennas with just a so-called simple antenna, since you can vary the shape of it in an unending variety of ways. The other day I was doing an experiment. An amateur radio one to be sure, but I was doing this within the realm of computing. I have been playing with digital modes for some time now and along the way shared some of what I've learnt. It occurred to me that I've been assuming that if you had the chance to follow along, you'd have access to the required hardware, simple enough, a $20 RTL-SDR dongle, but none-the-less, extra hardware. What might happen if you rule out that dongle and instead used a web-based receiver like WebSDR, or KiwiSDR, or any number of other such sites where you can pretty much tune to any band and frequency and see what's going on at a particular antenna location. For one it might allow you to decode something like APRS remotely, or decode an FT8 signal, perhaps even your own FT8 signal. Unfortunately most, if not all, of those sites include only the bare bones decoders for things like CW, AM, SSB and FM. After that you're pretty much on your own. You could do some funky stuff with a web-browser, linking it via some mechanism to the tool you use to actually decode the sound and there's some examples of that around, none that I really warmed to, since it requires that I open a web browser, do the mouse-clicky thing and then set-up some audio processing stuff. What if I wanted to figure out where the ISS was right now and wanted to listen to a receiver that was within the reception range of the ISS as it passed overhead, and automatically updated the receiver in real time as the ISS was orbiting the earth? For that to happen you'd need something like a command-line tool that could connect to something like a KiwiSDR, tune to the right frequency and extract the raw data that you could then decode with something appropriate. Turns out that I'm not the first person to think of this. There's even a project that outlines the idea of following a satellite, but it hasn't moved anywhere. There's also a project that is a command-line client for web-based KiwiSDR sites, but after spending some quality time with it and its 25 clones on github, I'm not yet at the point where this will work. Mainly because the original author made a design decision to record data to a file with a specific name and any clone I've found thus far only allows you to define what name to use. None so far actually appear to send their stream to something that can be processed in real time. Of course I could record a few minutes of data and process that, but then I'd have to deal with overlap, missing data, data that spans two files and a whole host of other issues, getting me further and further away of what I was trying to do, make a simple web-based audio stream digital mode decoder. As the Rolling Stones put it, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" And to me this sums up our hobby in a nutshell. When you call CQ, or go portable, or test an antenna, or attempt to build something new, there's going to be setbacks and unexpected hurdles. I think that it is important to remember that amateur radio isn't finished, it's not turn-key, no matter how much that appeals, you cannot find a one size fits all solution for anything, not now, not yesterday and not tomorrow. This hobby is always going to test boundaries, not only of physics, but your boundaries. It's after all one giant experiment. So, next time you don't get what you want, you might try something you find, and get what you need. Also, apologies to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger for butchering their words, a rockstar I am not. I'm Onno VK6FLAB