This is a basic tutorial to getting Openwebrx set up on a raspberry pi computer.
List of items you need:
- Raspberry Pi 3 or better
- USB Dongle such as RTL_SDR device
- Suitable Antenna
- Micro SD card at least 1GB
- OpenWebRX raspberry pi image
- Etcher software for writing to the SD card
Procedure:
- Download the Etcher software from here: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
- Download (and unzip) the OpenWebRX Raspberry Pi image from here: https://www.openwebrx.de/download/rpi.php
- Load your micro SD card into your windows laptop (that you downloaded the above software onto!)
- Open Etcher and click ‘Flash from file’ button then select the unzipped Pi image you downloaded, click ‘open’ (IGNORE ALL FORMATTING POPUPS – DO NOT FORMAT!
- Once image is loaded onto SD card, use file explorer to open the card, you should be able to view the ‘Boot’ folder
- Right click in this folder and create new text document, name it ‘ssh’, leave it empty
- Now load the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi device, connect it to ethernet, plug in an RTL SDR dongle and boot up the Pi.
- Once booted up it should appear on your home network called ‘openwebrx’
- Make a note of its IP address
- Open a web browser window and type the noted IP address into it, you should be met with this screen (and a scrolling waterfall):
Create a User management account (via SSH):
- Open a terminal window on your windows machine connected to the same network
- type ‘ssh pi@192.168.1.83’ (use your assigned IP address here which may not be the same as mine)
- type yes to accept
- you should get the openwebrx prompt
- type ‘sudo openwebrx admin adduser admin’
- then type a password at the prompt
- it should then have created your admin account
- go back to your openwebrx sdr webpage, click ‘settings’ in the top right corner. Use the login details you just created to login
- You can then setup your site information under ‘General settings’ etc
- List of SSH admin commands here: https://github.com/jketterl/openwebrx/wiki/User-Management
Port Forwarding:
You’ll need to create a port forwarding rule on your home router in order to see the websdr outside of your network. The default port to use for this is 8073 along with your assigned IP address. Alternatively you can setup a DNS service (google!). If you use port forwarding you need to make sure you have a fixed home public IP address, otherwise if your IP changes, users will not be able to reach your websdr. A DNS service helps here too.
Feel free to try my Web SDR: