What we're building, and why it isn't another console
Thetis, SmartSDR, ExpertSDR3, SDR Console, NereusSDR — all the same model, drawn better. A survey of the Linux SDR landscape, and the gap that turned into a project.
Field notes from the bench
Every SDR console since PowerSDR has the same shape: one app, one radio, one operator, one screen. Three things changed underneath, and almost nobody has built for any of them. These are the working notes from doing it differently.
Fix ExpertSDR on Linux Read the notes
Three strands of work, all of them written down as they happened rather than cleaned up afterwards. Where something is unverified, it says so.
Why a closed-source Qt 6 binary stops launching on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, the one package that fixes the common case, and the three escalating strategies when it doesn't.
A local web console for any Linux ham station. The station machine runs the service; any device on the network is the console. No Qt version, no Wayland-versus-X11, no toolkit problem at all.
Bringing an RFspace-class MB1 onto the network and getting remote access to it — including the internal USB-LAN adapter that makes radio discovery so fragile.
The three shifts the existing consoles were designed before.
TCI is a WebSocket. HPSDR Protocol 2 is UDP. Both are multi-client by design, and every console still behaves as though it owns the radio alone. The console stops being the owner and becomes one client among many.
The phone in the garden, the laptop on the sofa, the 7-inch panel on the radio itself. A local web app is the literal implementation of that, not a metaphor for it.
Propagation, spotting and band conditions belong next to the radio, not in a separate tab you forget to open.
Thetis, SmartSDR, ExpertSDR3, SDR Console, NereusSDR — all the same model, drawn better. A survey of the Linux SDR landscape, and the gap that turned into a project.
A silent Qt 6 launch failure, a vendor forum thread, and why ldd settles
the argument before you change anything.