Projects · updated October 2026
What's on the bench.
Four apps in active development. Clearwave Legacy is out now as Public Beta 1; the others follow as they're ready.
Clearwave Legacy
FM, AM and NOAA weather radio for Mac OS X 10.5, on PowerPC G5 and Intel Macs.
Clearwave rebuilt as a native Cocoa app for Leopard, so a Power Mac G5 or an older Intel Mac can be a proper radio. It finds the cleanest gain on its own, shows how good the signal really is, and tells you which station you're hearing and why it thinks so.
- FM stereo with RDS, NOAA weather radio with SAME alerts, and AM
- Quality seek: after locking it tries gain settings around the lock point and keeps the cleanest
- Scan scores each station from 0 to 100 and flags junk and image signals
- Signal meter in real dB of signal-to-noise, with a stereo/blend/mono badge
- Offline station map, FCC station ID and a DX logbook
- Per-dongle settings, hiss reduction and an adjustable audio buffer
- Version
- 0.5j, Public Beta 1 (October 10, 2026)
- Runs on
- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to 10.7 Lion, PowerPC G5 and Intel (universal)
- Needs
- An RTL-SDR dongle (tested with the RTL-SDR Blog V4)
Clearwave
The main Clearwave app for current macOS. Plug in a dongle, pick a station, listen.
A simple FM and HD Radio player for RTL-SDR dongles. The drivers and the HD Radio decoder ship inside the app, so there is no SDR stack to install first. One job, done well: no waterfall, no plugin zoo.
- FM with RDS, and HD Radio channels HD1 to HD4
- AM on the RTL-SDR Blog V4 (built-in upconverter) or a direct-sampling dongle
- NOAA weather radio, presets, scan and seek
- Optional USB GPS puck for portable listening
- Built-in updater that reads updates.tdtech.org
- Version
- 0.4 series, no public build yet
- Runs on
- macOS 13 Ventura or later
- Next
- Windows port in testing; Android and iOS planned
PowerRF
A spectrum and waterfall receiver in the spirit of SDR++, written from scratch for Leopard.
SDR++ can't run on Mac OS X 10.5, so this is a native rebuild of the idea in Objective-C and C: a live spectrum, a scrolling waterfall and the usual demodulators, light enough to leave most of a dual G5 free.
- Spectrum and waterfall with zoom, hover readout and peak markers
- WFM, NFM, AM, USB, LSB and CW
- Recorder and frequency bookmarks
- Hardware and software AGC; Bias-T on by default for the Blog V4
- Version
- 0.3.1, in testing
- Runs on
- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, PowerPC G5 and Intel (universal)
- Needs
- An RTL-SDR dongle (Blog V4 / R828D tested)
Cadence
A self-hosted music app that learns what you like from your own library.
A server that sits on your music library and an Android app to play it. Every track is analysed locally, and the server builds a For You mix, radio from any song and "Because you listened to" shelves from what you actually play and skip.
- Android app with home shelves, a now-playing queue and fast search
- Recommendations that use listening context, sessions and skips
- Local audio analysis across the whole library (53,000+ tracks)
- Your music stays on your own server
- Status
- In development, private for now
- Runs on
- Android, with a self-hosted server
- Next
- Faster For You, then the web and iOS clients
Also on the bench
Smaller or earlier-stage work. These get a full write-up when there's something to try.