Spectra Suite

SpectraFlux

The flagship — and the one you can run today. Native macOS, Apple Silicon, Metal-rendered. No installer, no dependencies.

What it does

Spectrum, waterfall, demodulation, recording, ADS-B, direction finding, chirp dechirping. Connect any of the supported radios below — or use the built-in test signal.

Supported radios

No hardware? The built-in test signal works out of the box. When you connect a real radio, SpectraFlux speaks to any of these:

More views

COMBO · spectrum + 2D waterfall · FM broadcast band

WATERFALL 3D · Inferno colormap · UI context view

Web remote · browser / iPad · runs anywhere on your network

IQ + ADS-B · 1090 MHz · constellation, phase, live aircraft list

WATERFALL 3D · single carrier rising from the noise floor

Installation

No installer, no dependencies, no admin password required.

1. Download & open

   Click the download button above, then double-click SpectraFlux.dmg to mount it.

2. Drag to Applications

   Drag SpectraFlux.app onto the Applications shortcut in the window that opens, then eject the disk image. You can launch it straight from the mounted image, but it goes away when the image ejects.

3. Double-click to launch

   macOS may briefly verify the app on first launch, then it opens. The Test Signal source is selected by default — no SDR hardware needed to start exploring.

SpectraSAT

A native macOS satellite tracker built around the same Metal pipeline as SpectraFlux. SGP4 propagation, polar pass plots, ground-track maps — and a live link into SpectraFlux that finally shows the satellite's real rest frequency on the waterfall instead of a Doppler-shifted number.

SAT_PROTO — a clean rigctld extension

For 25 years, satellite trackers have crammed rest frequency and Doppler shift into a single set_freq command — leaving the receiver unable to tell the two apart. SpectraSAT uses the new SAT_PROTO v1 extension to send them as separate atomic fields. The result is a transponder waterfall where the satellite's actual transmit frequencies appear on the X axis and stable carriers draw straight vertical lines instead of Doppler curves.

• Five new commands: \sat_caps, \sat_aos, \sat_los, \sat_dl, \sat_ul
• Auto-detects support via \sat_caps, falls back to legacy set_freq for any other rigctld radio
• Backwards compatible — every existing tracker and radio continues to work unmodified
• Public spec, CC0 / public domain — implement freely in any radio or tracker

What SpectraSAT does

• SGP4 / SDP4 orbit propagation with auto-updating TLE catalog
• Pass scheduler — queue any number of birds, automatic AOS / LOS handoff between passes
• Polar pass plots, ground-track maps, live globe view with footprints
• Per-bird transponder calibration — measure your bird's actual oscillator drift, save it, and SpectraSAT applies it transparently on every future pass
• Independent uplink / downlink VFOs with separate Doppler tracking for each band on V/U and L/U birds
• Drives SpectraFlux's NCO over rigctld in real time — per-sample frequency correction, no tuning hops, no glitches across the pass

SpectraADSB

Aircraft on a map, live, on every Apple device — without the rest of the SDR application weighing things down. Same Mode S / ADS-B decoder as SpectraFlux, packaged for the people who only want to watch traffic.

In Development

Native on macOS, iPadOS and iOS. The Mode S decoder runs locally; the map view is built on MapKit. No cloud hop, no subscription, no per-feed paywall — your antenna, your data.

• Mode S / DF 17–18 decoder with CRC-24 and preamble paths
• CPR even/odd position resolution, NL latitude zone tables
• Aircraft list with callsign, altitude, speed, vertical rate, lat/lon
• Beast TCP output for tar1090, Virtual Radar Server, FlightAware
• Background reception on Mac; live map view on iPhone & iPad

SpectraIR

Thermal cameras, native and fast. Real-time radiometric processing for GigE-Vision and ONVIF thermal sensors, rendered through the same Metal pipeline that drives SpectraFlux's waterfall.

In Development

Same colormap library as SpectraFlux — including the new Mondrian and Outdoor Alert palettes — driving a live thermal feed from any GbE camera on the network.

• GigE Vision and ONVIF thermal camera support
• Per-pixel metrology — point, area, line profile, isotherm
• Histogram equalization, AGC, manual range, fixed-point lookup
• Recording in radiometric raw + colormapped video
• Shared palette engine — every SpectraFlux colormap available

SpectraPassiveRadar

Passive coherent location using illuminators of opportunity — FM broadcast, broadcast TV, and other ambient transmitters. Detect and track without emitting a single watt.

Restricted

Two-channel coherent receive (reference + surveillance), cross-ambiguity processing, range-Doppler maps, and CFAR target detection. Several future high-tech imaging modes are in development.

• Multi-channel coherent IQ acquisition with the Nixara FPGA SDR
• Reference / surveillance channel cross-ambiguity processing
• Range-Doppler maps, CFAR detection, target tracking
• Bistatic geometry display with bistatic-iso-range contours
• Future imaging modes (research-mode, undisclosed)

Distribution restricted. Passive radar is dual-use technology subject to U.S. export-control considerations (broadly EAR Cat. 6, "sensors and lasers"). The application is not made available for general public download.

A few things to know