In January, András Retzler–owner of the SDR.hu KiwiSDR portal–started requiring registration and a ham radio license in order to access their extensive online database of SDRs.
Today, we learned of the site’s closure. Here’s the message posted at SDR.hu:
The SDR.hu project has been finished
I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who joined my journey with this project!
I hope you had a good time listening on the site, and learnt some things about SDR. The purpose of this site was to provide a technological demonstration for amateur radio operators about Software Defined Radio, and I hope this goal has been reached. As this website was a one-person hobby project, with my tasks and responsibilities growing, and my focus moving to other projects at which I hope to make a greater positive impact, I’m unable to further develop SDR.hu and protect it from abuse.
Furthermore, I think this site has some good alternatives now. Nevertheless, in my opinion amateur radio receivers should be shared with strict access control in the future.
If you have more questions, feel free to consult the FAQ.
73!
Andras, HA7ILM
SWLing Post contributor, Mark Fahey, shared the following message sent by Andras to all KiwiSDR owners in the database this morning:
Hello,
You are receiving this e-mail because you were listing a receiver on SDR.hu in the last 3 months.
I wanted to let you know that the SDR.hu project is discontinued.
This is because I have to focus on my PhD and unfortunately I don’t have enough time anymore to maintain the website and protect it from abuse.
If you have questions, there’s a FAQ on the front page: https://sdr.hu/
For KiwiSDR users there is another listing service available on the KiwiSDR website: http://kiwisdr.com/public (I’m not involved with this one.)
Thank you very much for having participated in the project!VY 73!
Andras, HA7ILM
Alternative KiwiSDR Portals
Fortunately, there are a number of other KiwiSDR portals that do not require registration or a call sign. Here’s a list:
- http://kiwisdr.com/public/ (list)
- https://ve3sun.com/KiwiSDR/ (list and map)
- http://rx.linkfanel.net/ (map view)
If you prefer another KiwiSDR portal, please comment with a link. I’ll try to update this post with any new additions!
My Name is Shaun ZL2CT from NZ
The clossure of this site – I feel was a mistake. I have been slowly introducing young children to Ham Radio and they were listening to your site. Some come from low income families, but would come down here and start up SDR.HU. Learning how to tune and fine tune. Hearing from all over the world about operators far away – their adventures, their stories and dreams.
Please dont remove it – otherwise it will be another door closed in their faces. Times are tough and we all need to find new people to pass on the Radio hobby. SDR.HU was bridging it to these kids. Now the page is empty…
73
No worries, Shaun! There are still KiwiSDR portals out there–the SDRs are not gone, just the SDR.hy portal.
Check out the links in this article:
https://swling.com/blog/2020/06/kiwisdr-coms-simple-urls-for-popular-kiwisdr-portals/
Links that are slightly easier to remember:
rx.kiwisdr.com
map.kiwisdr.com
snr.kiwisdr.com
Excellent! Great idea to make those forwards. Much easier to remember.
The webmaster says:
> in my opinion amateur radio receivers should be shared with strict access control in the future.
Why? These are receivers, picking up publicly accessible signals from across the spectrum and as they don’t transmit, no licence is required to use them. There seems to be no benefit in restricting their use, they are fun, they serve an educational purpose and I personally know a few people who have got into radio as a hobby (and then bought their own radios and taken up an amateur radio licence) through learning from using these public SDRs.
I agree–I see no reason to restrict an SDR network. That really makes no sense. I say this as a ham radio operator. Fortunately, I don’t think any of the other portals will do this.
I think one of his original theories was that, by restricting them to licensed operators only, there would probably be no time where there weren’t available spots for those people, whereas publicly accessible ones would be in heavier use and thus would deny access. Evidently, he considered licensed amateur operators to be more deserving of access, and as it wasn’t feasible to push them to the front of the queue, he would prefer others to be barred from the queue.
I do not know why he came to those decisions, however.
Folks, I think you may be reading something more into this sentence than is necessary. If you substitute the words “hobby radio” for “amateur radio”, I believe he is referring to the abuse of use by general public listeners. He has mentioned this issue on a number of occasions in the past but refrained from going into details.
He also hints at possible usage abuse by commercial organisations – see the last FAQ item where he refers to “non-amateur purposes” (again, substitute “non-amateur” for “non-hobby”). I’m suspecting that there may have been commercial streaming of content to other platforms – I’m only guessing here, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if that was happening. You may say, “So what?” But remember, this site was totally self-funded, so perhaps data loads were prohibitive. Again, I’m guessing here, but I’d prefer to give the man the benefit of the doubt rather than criticizing his generosity for making the site available over a number of years. In other forums, I have seen some quite unfair comments because of his decision to take down the site, which I find most disappointing. Nothing is forever!
Very good points, Rob.
At the end of the day, the SDR.hu site was a website supported by one individual but open to the public. And Andras did not charge for KiwiSDR listings, nor for site visitors. In my mind, anytime a site is self-supported, it falls under the category of “Nothing is forever” as you so well put it. Indeed *anything* online or offline is subject to this.
I think the part that I found a bit strange about restricting the site to amateur radio operators is–and correct me if I’m wrong here–SDR.hu was merely an interactive portal linking to KiwiSDR self-hosted sites/servers. Again, this may be a poor assumption, but I don’t think SDR.hu actually hosted and served up KiwiSDRs, it simply did a fantastic job organizing and linking to them (via list and map). So I read Andras’ stance about restricting access to the amateur radio community as more philosophical. But honestly, it’s sort of a dead point because his site is no more.
There have always been other similar KiwiSDR portals, but I alway thought SDR.hu was the best. Honestly, though, since they started closing up shop, the other KiwiSDR portals have gotten better.
I think Andras is entitled to his opinion and I 100% understand why he shut down the site. The guy is working on his PHD! 🙂 He simply needs to put his resources into his future. The KiwiSDR network has grown by orders of magnitude over the past few years–actively keeping up with the portal must have truly taken a lot of his free time.
Cheers,
Thomas