Desktop & hardwareAmateur radio software
HamStream
A commercial desktop application for amateur radio operators, with a licensing system, release channels and a marketing site that sells and delivers it.
Case study hamstream.co.uk
Desktop & hardware
AetherSDR
A native Linux client for a high-end software-defined radio whose own manufacturer ships Windows only — full waterfall, multiple receivers, real hardware protocol.
Amateur radio & signal processing2026
The brief
What we were asked for
A serious piece of radio hardware was sold with client software for one operating system. Operators who run Linux either kept a Windows machine alive for it or did without. The brief was a native client that speaks the radio’s own protocol properly, so the hardware works on the desktop its owner actually uses.
The challenge
What made it difficult
The constraints that shaped every decision after them.
- The control and streaming protocol is the manufacturer’s, versioned with the firmware, and mostly has to be learned from the wire rather than from a document.
- A panadapter and waterfall are a hard real-time drawing problem: megabytes a second of spectrum data, on screen, without dropping a frame or a sample.
- A client that is merely similar to the original is worse than none — operators have muscle memory, and an unfamiliar layout is a reason to go back to Windows.
What we built
How we solved it
The decisions that mattered, and why we made them.
01
The radio’s own language
Discovery, command, status and streaming are implemented against the hardware’s published protocol version, so the client is a first-class citizen on the network rather than a wrapper around someone else’s.
02
Drawn on the GPU
Spectrum and waterfall rendering is built for the data rate from the start, so wide bandwidth and a long waterfall history stay smooth on ordinary desktop hardware.
03
Familiar on purpose
The layout, controls and terminology follow what operators already know, so moving across is a change of operating system rather than a change of habit.
04
Native, not emulated
C++20 and Qt 6 compiled for Linux — no compatibility layer, no virtual machine, and no Windows licence in the shack.
The outcome
Where it got to
- A high-end radio usable on Linux without keeping a second machine for it.
- Multiple receivers, panadapter and waterfall running from the real hardware protocol.
- A codebase that tracks firmware releases instead of breaking on them.
Built with
Technology stack
- C++20
- Qt 6
- CMake
- UDP streaming
- DSP
- Linux
Services used
More work
Other projects
Desktop & hardwareRadio & instrumentation
RamdySDR
A native software-defined radio client speaking a hardware UDP protocol directly, with multiple receivers and a touch-first interface.
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VectorCreator
A desktop image-processing tool that converts raster artwork into clean, gradient-aware vector output through a multi-stage pipeline.
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