Getting started

From download to seeing your waterfall takes about ten minutes. The longest part is telling the radio to allow network control, which you only do once.

Once connected, the interface is five workspaces with a tab bar, at the bottom on a phone: Operate for the cockpit, dial, waterfall and push to talk; Digital for the native FT8 and FT4 station; CW for the keyer, decoder and trainer; Log for contacts and who heard you; Setup for everything else. Nothing stops when you switch tabs.

1. Download and run

Grab the build for the machine that will sit near your radio from the downloads. The file name carries the version and date, so your downloads folder always says whether you have the latest. Any machine that stays on works: the shack PC, a laptop, or a Raspberry Pi.

Windows. Download and double-click the .exe; there is nothing to unzip. The build is code-signed through Microsoft's own signing service, but SmartScreen also keeps a reputation score per publisher, built from how many machines have run their software, and a new signature starts at zero. If Windows shows "unrecognized app", click More info, check that the publisher reads Nicholas Dube, and choose Run anyway. The screen goes away on its own as the score grows. ShackNerd appears as an icon in the notification area, not as a window.

macOS. Unpack the archive to get ShackNerd.app, drag it to your Applications folder, and double-click it. The app is signed and notarized by Apple, so there is nothing to approve. It runs as a background app, no Dock icon and no window, because a Dock icon on a program with no windows made macOS wrongly report it as not responding. The browser page is the whole interface; to stop the program, press Quit ShackNerd under Settings, Help and support. The bare command-line binary is still inside the app at ShackNerd.app/Contents/MacOS/shacknerd for anyone who wants the -probe and -help flags.

Linux and Raspberry Pi. Unpack and run:

tar xzf shacknerd-*-linux-amd64.tar.gz
./shacknerd

On a desktop Linux launched from the file manager you get a tray icon; from a terminal it logs to the terminal.

Now open the address it shows, http://localhost:7300 on the same machine, or http://<that machine's IP>:7300 from your phone.

2. Let the radio accept network control

One-time setup on the radio's front panel. On an IC-7300 MK2:

1. MENU → SET → Network
2. Set Network Control to ON
3. Set Network User1 ID and Network User1 Password to something you will remember. These are what ShackNerd logs in with.
4. Note the radio's IP address on the same screen.

The radio and the ShackNerd machine must be on the same network for this part. Ethernet on the radio beats WiFi adapters for reliability.

3. Connect

In the browser, open Settings:

1. Choose Network as the connection
2. Enter the radio's IP address, the User1 ID and password
3. Press Save and connect

Within a couple of seconds the frequency appears and the waterfall starts moving. That is the whole setup for receive.

USB instead? If your radio is connected by USB cable, choose USB, press Find my radio, and wait the minute the sweep takes. On every connect ShackNerd also asks the radio which CI-V address it answers from, so a config that once belonged to a different Icom cannot leave the new radio silently ignoring every command. The sweep it asks every serial port in every language a radio might speak and fills in the port, speed and settings by itself, for Icoms and for Kenwood and Yaesu radios alike. Then pick the radio's sound card in the audio selectors below, so the waterfall, digital modes and CW decoding have something to listen to. On an Icom the waterfall updates several times slower over USB than the network can deliver, because that is a limit of the radio's serial port.

4. Turn on audio

In Settings, pick a receive audio rate. 16 kHz is ample for voice and easy on the network; 48 kHz is the full quality the radio offers. Then open the Audio section and press start. Phones require you to tap once, because browsers do not let pages make sound on their own.

5. What to try first

• Drag the tuning dial under the waterfall, or flick it to spin across the band
• Tap a signal on the waterfall to jump to it
• Tap the frequency readout and type one, like 7.200
• Open Presets and bands and save the frequencies you live on

When you are ready for more:

• Transmitting, including voice from your phone
• Remote operation from anywhere, the safe way
• CW, logging and FT8

If it does not connect

The troubleshooting guide covers the handful of things that actually go wrong, in the order they usually go wrong.