The biggest release VibeSDR has had. A standalone Apple Watch SDR, a server that shares your radio with the world, a broadcast-grade RDS analyser, and a waterfall rebuilt from the ground up.
Beta. Please report anything odd — this is a lot of new ground at once.
🎧 VibeSDR Jr — a whole SDR on your wrist, with no phone at all
Not a remote control and not a companion. Jr connects straight to a receiver over Wi-Fi or your watch's own mobile data, decodes the audio itself and draws its own waterfall. Leave the phone at home.
- Turn the Digital Crown to tune, tap the frequency to type one, press and hold for the menu
- Speaks UberSDR, VibeServer, OpenWebRX and KiwiSDR
- Four screens chosen by what the receiver actually is: spectrum waterfall, FM-DX tuner, DAB service list, ADS-B aircraft
- Audio keeps playing when you lower your wrist or press the crown — it behaves like a radio, not an app
- Auto contrast with manual Floor and Ceiling when it guesses wrong, full palette list, peak hold
- The band you're in, in words, from the ITU plan for wherever the receiver is
- Bookmarks, favourites, keypad, Water Lock, and your watch's own battery
⌚ VibeSDR Buddy — the Apple Watch companion
Buddy rides on the phone: the same waterfall, from the same data and the same palette.
- Works with the iPhone locked in your pocket
- Opens Buddy with VibeSDR closed and the phone wakes in the background — the waterfall arrives on your wrist without the phone screen ever coming on
- When the link is rough it tells you which link: two radio hops fail independently, so a diagram marks the struggling one over a waterfall that keeps drawing
📡 VibeServer — share your radio with the world
Plug an RTL-SDR or Airspy HF+ into an Android phone — or run VibeServer on a Mac, where it also drives SDRplay RSP receivers — and it turns that radio into a receiver anyone can listen to — in this app, on a watch, or in any browser, because a full web client is built in.
- On macOS it lives in the menu bar: set it to start with the Mac and it waits quietly for a radio to be plugged in
- A PIN, or leave it open
- Per-listener time limit with a visible countdown, and a cool-off before the same person returns — without which a limit is decoration
- IN USE badge so nobody taps a busy receiver
- Admin password to take your own radio back, unlock protected settings and listen without a limit — sent as a one-time cryptographic proof, so the password never crosses the network
- It knows what radio it has: an RSP (on the Mac) gets LNA state + IF gain reduction with a live total-system-gain readout so you can watch the AGC work; HF+ gets its attenuator, preamp and AGC; RTL gets its gain table. Controls a radio doesn't have are no longer shown
📻 Advanced RDS — a broadcast analyser, on a phone
Not just the station name. PI code and what it means, PTY, TP/TA/MS, RadioText and RadioText+, Long PS, PTYN, clock, language, alternative frequencies and the other stations in the network.
Then the measurements a DXer would normally buy hardware for:
- Pilot deviation and RDS deviation
- Block error rate
- Live constellation with a scatter figure, the MPX spectrum, and the symbol trace that explains the error rate at a glance
- RDS-to-pilot phase — the field this panel exists for. Correct is near 0°, or near 90° for quadrature; the middle ground indicates a transmitter fault. It will also tell you when a station's encoder isn't locked to its own pilot at all — a real fault, found on air, confirmed on two independent receivers
🙏 Thank you, Hans
Advanced RDS was calibrated against a PIRA broadcast analyser by Hans van Eijsden. Without him these numbers would be guesses. Hans measured our readings against professional equipment station by station, found that our phase was reading as its own reflection and that the deviation figures were scaled wrong, and kept testing until they agreed. He is also the only route we have to testing Long PS, RadioText+ and PTYN, because UK broadcasters simply don't transmit them.
✨ Also new
Razor-sharp waterfall — rebuilt to run on the GPU, with an unsharp-mask pass and a sharpness control. Weak signals that used to smear into the noise stand up as distinct traces. The same processing runs in the web client, so a browser looks like the app.
Automatic Link Management — VibeSDR works out how much your connection can actually carry and adapts continuously. Frame rate, resolution and audio step together rather than the picture simply breaking up. Move from Wi-Fi to mobile, or walk to the edge of Bluetooth range, and it settles to whatever the link sustains.
Full keyboard control — the whole app from an iPad or Bluetooth keyboard. Arrows tune and zoom, single keys pick the demodulator, Tab walks the panels. Press ? for the shortcut list. Coexists properly with iOS Full Keyboard Access.
New controls — a tuning drum you can flick, or tuner-style buttons; your choice, on both the main screen and the FM-DX dial. Long-press to sweep, a step-rate menu instead of cycling, a VFO lock, and a zoom drum that pans as well as zooms. Threshold controls are a live meter with a ball you drag.
Redesigned menu — audio controls gathered under one button, the demodulator popup carrying its own bandwidth sliders, hardware controls in a panel that changes shape for the receiver you're on. Receiver settings kept apart from yours.
Airspy HF+ Discovery support on Android and Mac — its own sample-rate list, attenuator, preamp and AGC, with RDS to match.
FM-DX: the OIRT band. Tuners below 87.5 MHz were unreachable. The dial still opens at 87.5, but grows the moment a server proves it can tune lower.
iCloud sync for favourites, bookmarks and settings — and a deletion on one device is a deletion everywhere.
🐛 Fixed
- Advanced RDS could half-die after a server sat idle — groups, AFs and PTY kept arriving while the station name, PI and RadioText never returned, even at 61 dB
- Audio could keep playing after a session time limit ended
- A shared radio could stall audio and RDS while the spectrum carried on, needing a retune
- VibeServer could abort when the first listener connected after a long idle
- Noise reduction and the notch filter could read OFF in the web client while actually ON
Android: VibeSDR-10.0.0-beta1.aab (Play Store) · iOS: via TestFlight