The Northern Utah WebSDR receiver system has a unique feature that allows you to listen in on local repeater activity in the Wasatch Front area of Utah. Like the other WebSDR receivers, it allows you to listen to activity on the 1.8 to 30 MHz HF bands, but they’ve added another remote receiver for local VHF/UHF activity. This receiver is located southeast of downtown Salt Lake City, on the face of the mountains, about 600 feet above the valley floor. For those of you familiar with the area, it is near the entrance to Parley’s Canyon, where I-80 and I-215 meet. To get from the SLC Airport to Park City, you go right past this area.
Someone has taken the time to mark all of the repeaters that can be heard on the tuning ruler, so all you have to do is click on one of the little brown flags to move from one repeater to another.
NOTE: Before you go any further, if you use the Chrome browser, or any based on Chrome, make sure you remember to click the colored box above and to the right of the tuning dial that says CHROME AUDIO START or you won’t hear anything on any of the WebSDR receivers. Also, please know that if you click these links from an Android or iOS device, you may get re-directed to a different receiver page that might not have the same capabilities. Nothing wrong with your stuff, just a limitation of the design of these awesome receivers. In fact, I sometimes listen to 75 or 40 meter nets with my iPhone, so it works, just a bit differently.
Here are a few web links you can copy/paste (or just bookmark this page) that you can save into your web browser:
This is the 146.62 repeater, the busiest in SLC, and links to one in Park City
Here is the 146.76 repeater, also quite busy, and is my “home” repeater, covering Salt Lake, Davis and Utah (where I am) counties area.
147.12 repeater near our TV towers on Farnsworth Peak (named after Philo Farnsworth, the actual inventor of television), southwest of SLC. This repeater is part of a wide area network of RF-linked repeaters up and down Utah. It is called the Intermountain Intertie system, rivaling the famous Cactus Net for sheer coverage. It also covers southern Idaho (Boise, Idaho Falls), parts of Wyoming, Montana, Yellowstone Park, Flagstaff and Phoenix, AZ, and Las Vegas. Lots of activity here as well. Unlike Cactus, all may use it without fees or membership. Read more about it here
By the way, many of the WebSDR receivers allow you to make your own weblink that you can save or bookmark. It allows you to instantly go to a particular WebSDR receiver, frequency and mode. You can see how I did this by examining the URL’s in the links above. Or, for example, if you like listening to the NoonTime Net on 40 meters from about 10 AM to 2 PM every day, your link would look like this one below. Go ahead and click on these examples if you’d like. I made sure they work:
http://websdr1.sdrutah.org:8901/index1a.html?tune=7284lsb
Note the data after the question mark. Just replace the frequency in kHz with whatever you want, and then add the mode, such as cw, usb, lsb, fm, or am. That’s all there is to it. If you want to listen using a different WebSDR receiver, just use its URL, and add the same frequency and mode data at the end. Here are two more examples of the NoonTime net again, but listening first from the KFS receiver near Pacifica, and right below it is the same net, listening from Phoenix.
http://69.27.184.62:8901/?tune=7284lsb
http://w7rna.com/?tune=7284lsb
Easy, right? Here’s another hint if you’d like to monitor several frequencies or repeaters at once. All you need to do is start one receiver session by clicking one of the above, then open a new browser instance or tab, then either click another link or paste one in, then go. Note that sometimes opening just a tab doesn’t give you audio from both receiver instances at the same time, depending on your browser. It worked OK for my Chrome browser, but your mileage may vary, etc.
OK, here is one last bonus link. If you would like to practice listening to CW, here is a link to 7047.5 kHz. It is the ARRL’s station W1AW. Every day it sends plain text from a recent issue of QST magazine at varying speeds. Very good practice, but don’t freak out if you happen to arrive while it’s sending at 35+ WPM! Yeah, I can’t copy most of that either. If you look at the web link, note that I inserted the frequency as 7046.75 kHz to get to 7047.5. I don’t know why, but on CW, it’s 750 Hz higher. Maybe a quirk. I dunno. I’ll come back and edit this if I figure out why.
There you go–you’ve got lots of cool receiver power all over the planet for the price of…nothing. Can’t beat that!