The listening post
Signals
The air is full of voices — dispatchers, hams, pirates, numbers stations. Everything here is legal to receive: these are public feeds, shared receivers, and published schedules. Tune in.
Band 01
Scanner Feeds
Police, fire, EMS, and more — streamed live by volunteers' radios. Listening is legal in most places; using what you hear to break the law is not.
- Broadcastify — the largest scanner feed directory on earth. Find your county, press play, hear the night shift.
- OpenMHz — a newer, open take on scanner streaming with a clean player and call archives. Same airwaves, less clutter.
- RadioReference — the frequency database behind half the scanner apps: who transmits where, on what band, with what codes.
Band 02
Listen Live in Your Browser
Real shortwave receivers around the world, tunable from here. No antenna required — someone else's antenna, your ears.
- WebSDR — the original network of browser-tunable software-defined radios. Pick a receiver, drag the waterfall, listen.
- KiwiSDR Network — hundreds of public KiwiSDR receivers worldwide. Spin the dial on a radio in another hemisphere.
Band 03
Shortwave
Broadcasters, pirates, utilities, and the occasional numbers station. The original open-source intelligence.
- HF Underground — the wiki and message board documenting pirate radio, numbers stations, and utility signals. The HFU knows what's on the air.
- short-wave.info — broadcast schedules for the world's shortwave stations: who's transmitting, on what frequency, right now.
Band 04
Ham Radio
The licensed side of the dial: study, get your callsign, and join the oldest technical community on the air.
Band 05
Signal Identification
Heard something weird on the waterfall? Identify it by its sound and shape.
- Signal ID Wiki — the encyclopedia of unknown signals: recordings, waterfall images, and decoders for the strange things on the bands.