I have been toying with the idea of sharing my 580' long Beverage receiving antennas via a Web SDR page, which can cover 360 degrees of the compass in four steps,
switchable by visitors.But I don't see anyone listed at
http://www.websdr.org/ that shares more than one RX antenna. They share multiple bands, but no one shares multiple, low-noise, directional DX antennas that can be remotely selected to listen in the desired direction on the selected frequency.
That's what I am thinking of doing, but I need some help if I am going to do this. :-)
These 2-wire, bi-directional Beverage receiving antennas are located in a very quiet remote rural location in SW Missouri, with almost zero power line noise or other interference that is common in most cities.
The Beverage antennas work VERY well for pulling very weak signals out of the QRM and noise, often far better than the common antennas hams use or any existing online Web SDR. You can view the details and hear some sound recordings comparing the Beverages to a dipole and inverted-L at
http://www.w0btu.com/Beverage_antennas.html .
Currently, the only SDR I have is a partially-assembled Softrock receiver that covers part of 160 meters. I know I need something better, and especially some kind of software and hardware to do this, but I don't know how (has this ever been done?). I would appreciate some advice and help so I could offer this online service. I am quite comfortable with designing and building whatever hardware this would require, but I do not have the time and expertise to write the software this would need. Does any software exist that would accomplish this?
If it turns out that (1) this will cost a lot of money, (2) I have to upgrade my Internet access, or (3) I have to pay someone to write software, then I may have no choice but to charge at least some people a per-user subscription for access to these antennas. However, I'd like to do this as a free service, at least for the foreseeable future. Perhaps in the future, if enough people ask for it, I may offer two-way TX/RX capability, but I really have no plans to offer more than sharing the 4 signals from these antennas.
These antennas cover:
(1) The AM broadcast band (and sometimes lower)
(2) 160 meters
(3) 80 meters
(4) 60 meters
(5) 40 meters
(6) and sometimes 20, 17, 15, and (rarely) 12 and 10 meters
However, how many bands we do this on remains to be seen.
Thanks in advance for your help and advice.