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 & unzip

   Click the download button above. macOS unzips automatically and produces SpectraFlux.app.

2. Drag to Applications

   Optional but recommended. The app runs from anywhere — ~/Downloads works fine for trial.

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