What would people want this to look like? Is there a backlog anywhere of stuff people would want?
Edit: I was thinking maybe something that reads from an rtl or airspy, or maybe soapy? Then takes requests for channels over websockets from a wasm front end, then have the demod wasm side? And a waterfall streamed as a video to aid in making the channel selection? It would save bw to put demod server side, but this way clients could use custom demods if they want.
The perceived stagnation in the field is because you can’t multiplex an SDR stream. One user can control the radio at a time. You can not listen on more bands than your radio can receive at once. Capping out at 192hz band audio sampling on most hardware. Which means you can read a wide signal but you can only read one area of the spectrum at a time.
You would need more radios. If you added more radios you would need antenna that worked across the various bands people would want to listen in on. Those can create “cross-talk” to other antenna close-by. There’s not a simple solution to this. Nor does the novelty of it warrant solving this problem.
I think something like FlightAware where users sample their own radios at frequencies and submit them to a service that can aggregate the spectrum in real-time is the only real way to provide a web-based “tune to any radio frequency” SDR.
An airspy can digitize 12MHz of bandwidth at once. Even without a gpu you can spit out easily over a dozen digitally subtuned channels. The bandwidth for all that raw signal data going out would be the problem. Only one person can control where that 12MHz is centred, but people can pick where in it they want to listen just like they do with websdr now.
Even a $30 RTL-SDR dongle can record 2Mhz of bandwidth reliably. I've recorded hours of signals just in case it sometime later becomes interesting, and it all lives in a little corner of my hard drive.
Damn! Yes, you would need to have one user center the spectrum read and you can mux the output to users wanting specific bands but I had no idea an airspy had such a wide audio capture.
Edit: I looked it up. You are indeed correct. 10MSPS IQ output. 10Mhz panorama spectrum view. That’s ridiculous! I just bought one.
I think the boxy one, the r2 not the mini, had some hacky way to get 80msps but it didn't specify how that made it over usb or why that wasn't the normal operational mode.
Edit: I was thinking maybe something that reads from an rtl or airspy, or maybe soapy? Then takes requests for channels over websockets from a wasm front end, then have the demod wasm side? And a waterfall streamed as a video to aid in making the channel selection? It would save bw to put demod server side, but this way clients could use custom demods if they want.