Amateur radio station management for Linux — logging, rig control and FT8 in one place, with no account to create and no internet needed to operate.
🌐 station-manager.org · 📦 Install guide · 📄 GPL-3.0-only
Station Manager runs as a local daemon (smd, written in Go) that serves a browser UI (Svelte 5 + Vite). The daemon and the UI ship as a single binary — install it, point a browser at localhost:8080, and you have a logging station. No desktop application, no cloud account, and nothing phoning home.
Status: v2 alpha. It is dogfooded daily from 7Q5MLV in Malawi and logs real contacts on real hardware, but it is early software with one primary operator. Expect rough edges, and read the install guide before depending on it.
128 contacts in 12 hours from 7Q5MLV, coloured by band, with the grey line live.
Logging
- Fast SSB/CW entry with live callsign enrichment (QRZ.com and hamnut lookups). Enrichment is fail-soft by design — a lookup that fails degrades the entry, it never blocks the QSO.
- Full ADIF data model,
HH:MM:SStime precision, multiple logbooks. - Session view with in-place editing, ADIF export and session email-out.
- Contacts map — great-circle paths with a live grey-line overlay.
FT8
- Live decode with band activity, per-CQ beam heading, country flags and worked-before marking.
- Answer a CQ, work a caller, or run CQ and auto-work a pile-up.
- Occupancy view (channels or spectrum) so you pick a clear transmit slot.
- ARRL Field Day exchanges, and reduced type-4 ladders for compound calls (
PJ4/NA2AA). - Optional PSK Reporter spotting.
Working Japan on 15 m. Band activity carries the beam heading for every CQ; the
ladder shows the exchange as it happens.
Rig control (CAT)
- Frequency, mode, VFO and band control over serial, with rig state pushed live to the UI.
- FT8 keys the rig through the same guarded path, with a hard stop that survives a lost link.
Getting QSOs out
- Automatic forwarding to QRZ.com and ClubLog, per destination and configurable.
- SM Cloud — an optional, self-hosted off-site backup of your log, so a dead disk is not a lost logbook.
- All of it is opt-in. The local database is always the authority.
Honestly: what is out there did not let me operate the way I want to. I do not generally use Windows and I do not want to use a Mac, so I was left writing it myself. Many of the existing packages work, but look out of date, cost too much, or have UIs busy enough to make setup a chore rather than a pleasure. This one is opinionated — deliberately.
It has to work without the internet. Here in Malawi the connection is not always available, and when it is, it is not always reliable. Everything that matters happens locally: logging, rig control, FT8, the database. Online logbooks are a bonus that syncs when there is a link — never a requirement.
FT8 is built in, not bolted on. No second application, no UDP bridge, no parallel logbook to reconcile afterwards: decoding, the exchange, rig control and logging are one program sharing one database. A contact worked on FT8 lands in the same log, with the same callsign enrichment and on the same map, as one worked on SSB.
Contesting is not the target today — general HF by SSB, CW and FT8 is — though support is planned, including multiple distributed stations.
- An RPM-based Linux with
systemd: Fedora 34+, RHEL/Rocky/AlmaLinux 8+, or recent openSUSE. A Debian/Ubuntu package is on the roadmap but not yet available. - A web browser. That is the entire UI.
- For CAT and FT8: a supported rig and a sound interface.
The daemon binds loopback only (127.0.0.1:8080) and keeps all state under your home
directory — single user, single machine, no network exposure by default.
Install and first-run setup: docs/install.md.
CAT is supported, but only the Yaesu FTdx10, Yaesu FT-710 and Icom IC-7300 have been tested — those are the rigs I own. Rigs are described by data files rather than code, so adding one does not need a new build. Definitions and reports from other operators are welcome.
- Install and first run — from a fresh machine to your first logged QSO.
- Documentation map — which documents are kept current, and which are a historical record.
- Architecture decisions live under
docs/decisions/.
Station Manager is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 only
(GPL-3.0-only) — see LICENSE and NOTICE.
It was MIT-licensed until 2026-05-31. The move to GPL-3.0-only follows from the FT8 decode path:
that capability comes from the companion library go-ft8,
a WSJT-X/jt9-derived work that is GPL-3.0-only. Linking it makes the combined work a GPLv3
derivative, so the whole project adopts the same copyleft licence. The reasoning is recorded in
docs/decisions/0023-relicense-to-gplv3.md and
docs/licensing.md.
73 de 7Q5MLV