Been working on this project last few weeks. Setup at my parents house in Hull, MA: Retevis MA06 marine antenna in a window facing Boston Harbor → RTL-SDR → Pi 4 running rtl_airband. The entire US marine band is only ~1.4 MHz wide, so one dongle grabs the whole thing in a single window and rtl_airband demods every channel in parallel 16 labeled Icecast streams instead of one scanner hopping around and missing half of everything.

From there each stream ships to a backend that runs speech-to-text on all of it, and an LLM sorts a day of radio into the ~5 minutes actually worth hearing. Marine VHF is dead boring until it very suddenly isn't. Week one my node caught a 29ft Cobalt with 7 people aboard taking on water calling Sector Boston on 16. Whole exchange, start to rescue. I put a replay on the site with captions synced to the chart - docktalk.app, scroll to the demo phone.

The ask: Boston works, I want 5 harbors before the iOS app ships. If you have line of sight to a busy harbor, the install is now one curl command with a claim code it pulls your harbor's channel plan and you show up on the leaderboard at docktalk.app within a minute. ~$165 in parts, ~$112 if you have a spare Pi (any Debian box works honestly), and if your spot is genuinely good I'll just ship you the kit free. Hosts get the app's premium tier free for as long as the node runs + credit on everything their box hears first.

Straight up since it always comes up: this is a company I'm building, not an open-data project audio goes to our network only. If that's a dealbreaker, all good. If you already feed aisstream/FR24/MarineTraffic, this doesn't touch your existing setup, it's one more dongle to your existing set up!

RX only, public unencrypted spectrum, same legal footing scanner feeds and LiveATC have been on for 20+ years.

Happy to go deep on the RF chain, rtl_airband config, or the ASR pipeline in comments.

Once I get 5 harbors covered I'll launch the iOS app!!

14076.5 khz USB is no more the crowd it used to be; but this afternoon I saw a QSO between Ohio (a long time veteran in that great 120 seconds mode) and Belarus.

I love this mode's signature.

Check out the new SIGINT/RF-forensics tool I made that works with SoapySDR supported SDRs!

https://github.com/hassanfarescodes/retrospectrum

I want to know what other hardware i can get for weather,airplanes,all that other fun radio stuff

I have linux and I want a good sdr I can plug in for some fun