EasySpotter

A receiving station in one program. Plug in an SDR, pick your bands, and EasySpotter decodes FT8, FT4, JS8, WSPR and JTTY on all of them at once, maps the openings live, reads RTTY, Olivia, PSK and CW on their known frequencies, saves weather-fax charts and SSTV pictures, listens with a waterfall and, if you like, shares the receiver on the web. Free, for Linux and Windows.

Download EasySpotter 0.92.0 Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux and Windows

EasySpotter's Live Map tab: ten minutes of spots from a station in North Carolina on a world map, dots coloured by band, with the openings to Europe, Japan, the Caribbean and South America outlined in each band's colour and a time slider over the day's spots-per-hour graph
Live Map: ten minutes of spots on a world map, dots and openings coloured by band. Drag the two ends of the slider to see any stretch of the last 24 hours.
EasySpotter's Live FT8 tab: one RX-888 MKII decoding eleven bands, 160 m through 6 m, with a spots-per-hour graph for each over six hours
Live FT8: one RX-888 MKII on eleven bands, with spots per hour for each over 1, 6 or 24 hours.
The Stats tab: band activity by hour for the last seven days with sunrise and sunset, total spots per hour over the week, and today's totals by band, by mode and by station
Stats: seven days of band activity by hour with daylight, the total spots per hour, and today's counts by band, mode and station.
The Modes / Frequencies tab: the receivers found, the FT8, FT4, WSPR and JS8 intervals, the keyboard modes to watch and a tick box per band
Pick the receiver, the modes and the bands; EasySpotter places them.
The Sharing tab: the station on the air with EasySDR, listener limits, session length and the modes listeners may choose
Sharing: the same receivers on the web with EasySDR, with your own limits.

What it does

  • Decodes FT8, FT4, JS8, WSPR and JTTY on many bands at once from one receiver. An RX-888 MKII hears all of HF, 160 m through 10 m, in a single capture; an SDRplay RSP or an RTL-SDR dongle covers the bands that fit its passband.
  • Shows the activity live: a world map of the stations heard with the openings outlined band by band for any stretch of the last 24 hours, a card per band, spot-rate graphs with each band's peak, a seven-day band-by-hour map with daylight, countries heard and the farthest station.
  • Reports spots to PSK Reporter and WSPR to WSPRnet when you switch it on, with duplicates filtered across receivers. Reporting is off until you enter your callsign and grid.
  • Decodes JTTY, the new keyboard mode in WSJT-X 3.3, and reports its callsigns to PSK Reporter alongside the FT8 spots.
  • Watches the known keyboard-mode frequencies for RTTY, Olivia, PSK31, PSK63 and CW, and shows every callsign heard on the Live Text Modes tab.
  • Saves weather-fax charts (WEFAX) and SSTV pictures as they arrive, each captioned with the transmitter, the frequency and the time, on the Live Images tab.
  • Listens in USB, LSB, AM and FM with a waterfall, to your speakers or to a virtual audio input for WSJT-X, fldigi or any other decoder.
  • Includes EasySDR: the same receivers can be heard on the web by anyone with a browser, listed on the W2JKT station directory. Sharing is a switch on the Sharing tab.
  • Runs the receivers at boot with no one logged in, if you want a station that is always on watch.

Download

EasySpotter 0.92.0, 64-bit PCs. Works with SDRplay RSP receivers (RSP1, RSP1A, RSP1B, RSP2, RSPduo, RSPdx), the RX-888 MKII and RTL-SDR dongles.

Ubuntu or DebianUbuntu 24.04 or newer, Debian 13easyspotter_0.92.0-1_amd64.debSHA-256 835c62d02520ee6dc3987720d6064cbc77e43bda8e0e8c4d510a5eca088c3f8b8.5 MB
FedoraFedora 40 or newereasyspotter-0.92.0-1.x86_64.rpmSHA-256 cac75ac0d4a29cd93d3928404f107fd6090cd6ab6186894fe1dc34a801db675612.2 MB
Arch Linuxcurrent Arch Linuxeasyspotter-0.92.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zstSHA-256 2bdef6ab1bc1eb6996c81ac3c0bf037efbc55f0b5f4bfa67586eb0e8dc9b59e110.0 MB
WindowsWindows 10 or 11, 64-bit, still being testedeasyspotter-0.92.0-win64-setup.exeSHA-256 3b7793ab201b37d7904ed46226dbf2bc2f1cbb896c85385bb360abdc6b8676d634.2 MB
  1. Install it:
    • Ubuntu or Debian: sudo apt install ./easyspotter_0.92.0-1_amd64.deb
    • Fedora: sudo dnf install ./easyspotter-0.92.0-1.x86_64.rpm
    • Arch Linux: sudo pacman -U ./easyspotter-0.92.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst, then wsjtx from the AUR
    • Windows: run the installer; it sets up the USB drivers for the RX-888 and RTL-SDR dongles itself.
    The Linux packages pull in WSJT-X, whose decoders EasySpotter uses.
  2. For an SDRplay receiver, also install SDRplay's API from sdrplay.com. RX-888 and RTL-SDR need nothing more.
  3. Open EasySpotter from your applications menu, press Refresh to find your receiver, tick the bands you want, and press Start.
  4. To report what you hear, enter your callsign and grid square on the Settings tab and switch on PSK Reporter or WSPRnet reporting. Nothing is sent until you do.

EasySpotter is free to use. The program is proprietary; the FT8, FT4, JS8, JTTY and RTL-SDR helpers it ships with are separate GPL programs, with their licenses and source offers in the package's documentation folder. The Windows version is new: if something does not work, press Send diagnostics on the Logs tab, or get in touch.