Setting up an OpenWebRX site
Troubleshooting guide from Jacob:
Adding to a Raspberry Pi
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.
Adding OpenWebRX Plus to a Linux Machine
NOTE: The Machine needs to be on Ubuntu 22.04 OS (Jammy Jellyfish) for this to work
Info Here: https://luarvique.github.io/ppa/#if-you-are-an-ubuntu-user-
open a terminal
go to root by typing:
sudo -i
Add the openwebrx plus repository:
wget -O - https://luarvique.github.io/ppa/openwebrx-plus.gpg | gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/openwebrx-plus.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/openwebrx-plus.gpg] https://luarvique.github.io/ppa/ubuntu ./" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openwebrx-plus.list
Then:
apt update
You also need to add the original repository as it contains other required packages:
wget -O - https://repo.openwebrx.de/debian/key.gpg.txt | gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/openwebrx.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/openwebrx.gpg] https://repo.openwebrx.de/ubuntu/ jammy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openwebrx.list
Then:
apt update
Finally, install by typing:
apt install openwebrx
To check its now working, open a browser and go to: http://localhost:8073/
Add port forward rules to your router then use your public IP address or use a DNS provider in order to make it available to the public
Now all you need to do is configure the RTL (or other) devices and your frequency profiles
Adding an SSH server to Ubuntu (for remote access to the Machine)
open a terminal and type:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install openssh-server
It will start automatically. To verify its running type:
sudo systemctl status ssh
access using a SSH software such as Putty on a local machine:
ssh username@ip_address
You may need to enable SSH on your Linux firewall:
sudo ufw allow ssh