Jeff’s Drake R8 has been online for 24 years and counting

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Jeff Chilton, who writes:

I’ve been finding myself at your excellent SWLing Post site frequently of late.

I wonder if you’ve seen my online shortwave receiver website. It’s been online since 1995, when it looked like this:

It still controls the same old Drake R8 receiver at my house, but I recently rebuilt the pages and server code to make the interface more interactive and improve the audio streaming. It’s now at:

https://www.chilton.com/R8

It is still new, and there’s a lot of Javascript involved so could be a compatibility issue but please do give it another try.

Thanks, Jeff! I’ve spent a little time tuning the R8 and the interface is quite intuitive. With that said, readers, ergonomics was not the original Drake R8’s strong suit. If you’ve never used one, it takes a while to learn to use change filters, select modes, etc. via the row of six buttons above the keypad and encoder.

Also, Jeff’s R8 is not the U Twente web SDR–I’m guessing it can only handle one operator at a time, so we’ll see how this goes as everyone checks it out today!

Click here to check out Jeff’s Drake R8.

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5 thoughts on “Jeff’s Drake R8 has been online for 24 years and counting

  1. Daniel

    Unless I am missing something, I don’t see a location for the receiver?
    Also, I can’t seem to get any reception on this — a software issue?

    Reply
    1. Jeff C.

      Hi Daniel,

      The biggest software issue, I think, is incompatibility with iPhones which don’t support the HTML5 feature I used for sound streaming. (iPad OS recently started supporting it so maybe iOS gets it too before long?)

      Internet Explorer doesn’t like a lot of my JavaScript but Microsoft Edge works fine.

      I have on my to-do list the addition of a link to a map showing the receiver location (near Washington D.C.) perhaps showing day- and nighttime areas.

      Thanks for checking it out,

      /jwc

      Reply
  2. Edward

    The hardware keeps working all solid-state no moving parts but the software breaks and needs to be reconfigured to meet the broken performance of the internet. Does anyone know of a net connected computer that has been working for 24 years without crashing?

    Reply

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