FreeDV — who is on digital voice

Radio / CAT — 1.53.0

The shared Radio/CAT panel is at the top. Frequency steps now also include 1 MHz and 10 MHz. Connect and Disconnect are available in the Transceiver menu, which reflects the current connection state.

FreeDV is the open-source digital voice mode for HF. Its current mode RADE sends speech in about 1.5 kHz of bandwidth and stays intelligible where SSB has long disappeared into the noise. The community is small and meets on a handful of frequencies — above all 14.236 MHz — and reports to each other on FreeDV Reporter (qso.freedv.org): who is online, on which frequency, who is transmitting, who hears whom.

HAM-Tools brings exactly that board into the app — and listens in: the built-in RADE receiver decodes the signal from the radio and plays the speech on the speaker (see Reception). Talking remains FreeDV GUI's job; its QSOs land in the logbook automatically (see below).

New in 1.48

Reception right inside HAM-Tools: RADE decoder with sync indicator, SNR and frequency offset, from the radio or from a recording. The module itself (Reporter list, map, spot source, FREEDV submode) arrived in 1.47.

Reporter in the logbook from 1.52.0

An info icon beside the logbook FreeDV source checkbox shows reporter status. Use it to connect or disconnect and toggle spot forwarding. Enabling forwarding also imports already known stations. New spots use DIGITALVOICE; an active SSB-only filter hides them. Previously stored spots are not modified retroactively.

Opening the module

FreeDV sits in the sidebar with the main applications, below WSPR. Like Logbook and WSPR it takes over the whole window: connection, identity and status message on the left, the online stations on the right. ‹ Overview takes you back.

Connecting

Connect at the top right. After a second or two the list fills, the status pill turns green, and Last event ticks with every server ping. If the connection drops, HAM-Tools retries on its own — after five seconds at first, then at growing intervals up to half a minute; the reason stays red in the pill meanwhile. While connecting and reconnecting, Disconnect is already shown and stops the attempts from 1.56.

Two ways to sign in:

Mode	What happens
View	You see all online stations but do not appear on qso.freedv.org yourself. No callsign needed.
Visible	HAM-Tools appears with your callsign, locator and frequency in the list — as receive-only, as long as no decoder is running.

Callsign and locator come from Settings → Station. If one is missing, "Visible" falls back to "View", and the pill shows "Connected — view only"

from 1.56. The mode can only be changed here and

under Settings → FreeDV → Sign-in after Disconnect, also while connecting.

Public

In "Visible" mode your callsign, locator, frequency and status message are visible to anyone who opens qso.freedv.org — just like with any other FreeDV client.

Status message: up to 80 characters of free text others see next to your callsign ("QRV 20m, hexbeam"). It goes out automatically on connect; Send status publishes changes to the reporter; it does not transmit audio. Only effective in "Visible" mode.

Connect automatically when opened: tick it and the module connects by itself every time you open it.

Reception

The Reception panel at the top left is the built-in RADE decoder. It takes the audio from the radio, decodes the RADE signal and plays the speech on the speaker — no FreeDV GUI needed.

Preparation in Settings → FreeDV: the audio input is the radio's USB codec (the same one as for SSTV and WSPR), the speech output your Mac speakers or headphones. The radio sits on USB-D or the data filter, dial frequency e.g. 14.236 MHz.

Start connects input, decoder and output. The pill on the right shows the state:

Pill	Meaning
Search	decoder running, no RADE signal found yet
Sync	signal found — SNR and frequency offset are shown, speech plays
Error	device or decoder could not be started; the reason is shown below

If the selected speech output is not connected, the receiver does not start and reports «Selected speech output device not found»

from 1.56. If reading a recording fails, «The

recording could not be decoded» appears. In the settings, a missing device stays selected as «Unavailable: …» instead of silently switching to «System default» — connect the device or choose a new one.

• Level: input level in dBFS. Red means too loud — turn down the radio's output level or the USB codec. If it stays at −120 dB, no audio arrives at all: wrong device selected, or HAM-Tools lacks microphone permission (System Settings → Privacy → Microphone).
• SNR: signal-to-noise ratio in 3 kHz, as FreeDV GUI shows it. RADE decodes down to below 0 dB.
• Frequency offset: how far the signal sits from nominal. The decoder compensates a few hundred hertz itself; for larger values retune the VFO.
• Overs: counts the detected end-of-over signals, i.e. completed transmissions of the other station.

Decode recording (waveform symbol next to Start) plays a WAV file through the same chain in real time — to try things out without a radio, or to listen to an off-air capture afterwards. The file's sample rate does not matter; mono or channel 0 is used.

What the receiver does not do (yet)

It does not transmit — talking remains FreeDV GUI's job. Callsigns from the end-of-over signal are not decoded yet; they show up via the Reporter list instead. RADE V2 (preview) can be selected in the settings but is not yet released by the FreeDV team and may change without notice.

While the receiver runs, the selected audio input is in use — do not start SSTV or WSPR reception on the same device at the same time.

Station list

Column	Meaning
Dot	red transmitting now · green heard something in the last two minutes · blue online. An ear symbol marks receive-only stations.
Callsign, Locator	as reported by the station; transmitting stations in bold
Freq (kHz), Band	the station's dial frequency; empty until it reports one
Mode	RADEV1, 700D … according to the client
Hearing	last decoded counterpart with SNR
km, Bearing	computed from your own locator
Message	the station's status message
Updated	when this row last changed

Above it: a band filter (only bands with someone on them), a search field over callsign, locator and message, and the List / Map switch. Right-click the header to show or hide columns; the app remembers order and widths.

On the Reporter on the left shows the counters and active bands — click a band to set the filter.

Map

Every station with a locator gets a dot in the same colour logic as the list, your own QTH a house symbol. The buttons at the top right: zoom, Show all, Whole world, callsign labels on/off and Lines from your own location — great circles to all stations, handy to see where the antenna would have to point. Clicking a dot also selects the station in the list.

With stations on both sides of the date line (e.g. VK/ZL and the Americas), Show all picks the shorter span across the Pacific

from 1.56.

Into the logbook

Double-click a station (or context menu → Log this station) pre-fills the logbook's QSO form: callsign, locator, frequency, band and mode DIGITALVOICE with submode FREEDV. The status message goes into the notes.

At the same time, the same things happen as with a spot click in the DX cluster:

• If CAT is connected, the rig jumps to the frequency and into the data filter (USB-D above 10 MHz, LSB-D below) — FreeDV runs through the sound card, not the microphone.
• If the rotor control is active and "rotate on spot click" is on, the antenna turns to the bearing.

The view stays on FreeDV from 1.49 — the double-click only prepares the QSO. The next time you open the logbook the draft is in the form; logging happens there. (Up to 1.48 the app jumped to the logbook.)

Radio/CAT right next to it from 1.49: at the bottom of the left column sits the same Radio/CAT panel as in the logbook — frequency with arrow buttons, mode, VFO, S-meter. You see the QSY from the double-click immediately and can fine-tune without switching views.

Stations in the DX cluster

While the module is connected, the FreeDV stations also flow into the DX cluster as spots with the source FreeDV: into the spot list, the bandmap and the world map. An online station with a frequency is a spot "X is on 14236 kHz", a reception report a spot "X hears Y at 9 dB" — with X as the spotter, just like in the classic cluster.

The spot list has its own FreeDV source checkbox (yellow) for that, as does the cluster bar in the logbook. If you do not want the stations in the cluster, switch the feed off in Settings → FreeDV.

Visible mode: reporting your frequency

In "Visible" mode HAM-Tools reports your frequency to the Reporter — from CAT or, without CAT, from the frequency field of the QSO form. While you turn the VFO the app waits for one second of rest before sending, so the server does not get a report for every detent. Reported frequency in the connection panel shows what the Reporter knows about you.

FreeDV GUI for talking

To talk you still need FreeDV GUI (freedv.org) — the built-in receiver only listens. The two programs complement each other:

1. In FreeDV GUI under Tools → Options → Reporting enable QSO logging, host 127.0.0.1, port 2237.
2. In HAM-Tools under Settings → External Loggers enable the WSJT-X / … / FreeDV bridge on port 2237.
3. Log QSO in FreeDV GUI — the QSO appears in HAM-Tools with MODE=DIGITALVOICE and SUBMODE=FREEDV, the way LoTW, eQSL and Club Log expect it.

FreeDV GUI takes callsigns from the end-of-over signal into its log selection; HAM-Tools shows them in parallel via the Reporter list.

Good to know

• The Reporter protocol is not officially documented. HAM-Tools speaks it the way FreeDV GUI and the RADE apps for Android and iOS do. After a server update the connection may stumble for a while — an app update fixes that.
• The server also broadcasts a group chat; HAM-Tools deliberately does not show it.
• No rig needed to watch: the module works on any Mac with internet. Only the receiver, Visible mode with frequency and logging via FreeDV GUI need the station.
• The decoder runs as a separate helper process (rade_helper, built from the FreeDV project's official C library, BSD licence). It needs about one percent of a CPU core and cannot take the rest of the app down even if it crashes — the panel reports that as an error.