ChirpView

A program for receiving chirp sounders

ChirpView is a Windows program for receiving ionospheric chirp sounders. These sounders are HF radio transmitters used for monitoring ionospheric propagation. ChirpView provides one way of receiving these transmissions. More information on this technique can be found here. System requirements are:

1. A PC running Windows 95/NT4 or later with a 16-bit stereo soundcard and at least a Pentium 133 MHz CPU.

2. A HF receiver with USB capability (and preferably with the ability to turn off the AGC)

3. A GPS receiver with a PPS (pulse per second) output or a receiver capable of tuning an LF time signal such as MSF on 60 kHz to produce an audio tone output.

NOTE: ChirpView comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You are strongly advised to back-up your system before installing and using this software.

Download

The installation package is available here:

• ChirpView 1.21 and RxDelay 1.20 - adds ability to set serial baud rate for GPS receiver.
• ChirpView and RxDelay 1.20

Unzip the archive into the directory into which you want to install the software. Double-click on "Chirps.exe" to run.

Source Code

From version 1.20, ChirpView and its supporting utility program RxDelay are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The source code for the two programs is available separately here:

• ChirpView 1.21 source code
• ChirpView 1.20 source code
• RxDelay 1.20 source code

Important Note

I no longer actively maintain ChirpView. This means I am not likely to fix bugs or add new features. As the source code is available, you are welcome to modify and re-distribute it as provided for under the GPL. If you are interested in taking over maintenance of the software, please let me know.

Realtime chirp reporting

The ChirpView realtime chirp reporting protocol is described here.