AntennaHead
macOS · software-defined radio

Turn an RTL-SDR dongle into a radio you listen to from any browser.

AntennaHead tunes the radio, demodulates FM / AM / airband / shortwave, and streams the audio over your network. ControlBooth is its companion for wiring up custom audio pipelines — it can receive digital modes like NRSC5 (HD Radio) and APCO-25 (public-safety bands) using external software (not included). Both are free and open source.

Two apps, one audio pipeline

They share a streaming engine, a pipeline runner, and a logging window — but each has a distinct job.

AntennaHead

Sandboxed macOS app. Fixed, known-good pipelines: RTL-SDR tuner, audio-input capture, Gqrx bridge, text-to-speech, and playback of recordings. Serves the HTML UI on your LAN over HTTP/HTTPS.

ControlBooth

Unsandboxed companion. Build a chain of command-line tools (nrsc5 → sox, and the like); ControlBooth appends a UDP sender and ships raw PCM to AntennaHead to stream.

The web UI

A lightweight jQuery/Skeleton front end — favorites, categories, a touch tuner keypad, high-speed scanning, now-playing status and spatial-audio controls. Runs on phone, tablet or desktop.

A quick look

The panel below is the real AntennaHead web UI, running as a static preview with canned data — navigate it like you would on a phone. The AntennaHead page has the full embed plus screen-recorded videos from the iOS Simulator.

Static preview · no radio connected