The weak-signal release. VibeServer now treats four different faults in broadcast FM separately, because they want opposite cures — and each one declines to act unless its own measurements say it will help, so a strong station is left exactly as it was.
Four faults, four switches
| Fault | What it does | |
|---|---|---|
| NR | continuous noise | Rolls the top off the stereo difference signal, where FM noise is worst, keeping the bass and mid image. Treats mono hiss too. |
| IMS | a strong neighbour | Narrows the receiver only when an adjacent station is interfering — and deliberately not for noise, where narrowing measurably costs you up to 10 dB. |
| CEQ | a reflection | A blind equaliser that undoes multipath. Multipath is distortion, not weakness: a strong station can suffer it. |
| NB | impulse noise | Removes ignition, thermostats and switch-mode supplies — worth 6.5 dB when they are present. |
All four are on by default, and each has its own switch for A/B-ing what it is doing.
Stereo that stays
- Stations that under-inject their pilot (below the 6.0–7.5 kHz specification) now lock and stay locked. The guarantee that static never produces stereo is kept as a measured 2.6× margin, not a pass/fail.
- Two long-standing faults that dropped stereo for a second at a time — one on every RDS refresh, one every time the Advanced RDS panel was opened — are fixed. Measured from on-air recordings: seventeen dropouts became none.
Advanced RDS
New readings: MPX signal-to-noise with the filter corners it produced, multipath depth (and "too noisy to judge" when it honestly cannot tell), what the equaliser achieved before and after, how much the blanker is removing, and whether narrowing the receiver would help or cost. Alternative frequencies are now listed with a tick against the confirmed ones — on a noisy station the unconfirmed ones are usually phantoms invented by block errors.
Also
- Station logos now work for stations that transmit no ECC (most of them), and the broadcaster's own artwork always outranks a name match.
- Admin: the idle re-lock left the menu claiming to be unlocked with no way to unlock again; the page ticket could lapse while the socket stayed unlocked. Both fixed.
- The connection log derives country and network at render time, so a row is no longer stuck with whatever the database said when the connection opened — and a VPN or corporate egress now shows its provider, which is usually why a country looks wrong.
- RTL-SDR Blog V4L ("V4 Lite") support is added but NOT YET TESTED on real hardware. The V4L uses a different tuner chip to the V4 and needs driver support to switch its HF input correctly. If you have one, it should work — please tell us what you find. The same update brings a sensitivity improvement on HF for the existing V4.
- macOS: included. Linux: depends on your distribution shipping librtlsdr 2.0.3 or later (
apt-cache policy librtlsdr0).
- macOS: included. Linux: depends on your distribution shipping librtlsdr 2.0.3 or later (
macOS: download below, notarised — unzip and drag to Applications.
Linux / Raspberry Pi: sudo apt update && sudo apt install --only-upgrade vibeserver