The ecosystem

SDR-SLC isn’t a single app. It’s a small stack of parts that snap together so a radio amateur can put a capable SDR station on the air without spending a fortune.

How the pieces fit

At the centre is the SDR-SLC client on your Mac. It does the display, the demodulation, the tuning, and the transmit control. It talks over your local network to a backend, the hardware actually connected to your antenna:

• the SDR-SLC HF transceiver for 1.8 to 30 MHz, receive and transmit;
• an RTL-SDR (via the RTL-SDR daemon) for low-cost wideband receive;
• a BladeRF (via the BladeRF daemon) for VHF/UHF, including transmit.

For digital voice, the codec server handles the D-STAR, YSF, and DMR codecs so the client can decode and encode them. And the specification documents describe the whole protocol in the open, so nothing here is a black box. You can build your own backend, or your own tools, against it.

HF or VHF/UHF, your choice

Because the client speaks one common protocol to every backend, the same application drives an HF station one day and a 2 m / 70 cm station the next. Pick the hardware that suits the bands you want; the client stays the same.

Open by design

The client is a paid App Store download purely so distribution is painless. Everything else, the hardware, daemons, codec server, and specifications, is free and open source. Build the whole thing yourself, or mix and match with hardware you already own.

Getting started

New here? The fastest path on the air: get the client, connect a backend, and start working the band. If you get stuck, the Support page has the common questions and how to reach us, and the build log tells the story of how the whole thing came together.