How It Works

What is Kestrel Listen?

Kestrel Listen is a community-powered radio monitoring network. There's no subscription and no company behind the antennas: every node is an independent receiver, owned and run by the person who set it up, sharing what it hears into a shared, decentralised network with no single point of failure. If one operator goes offline, the rest of the network keeps running.

The network is already listening across Air (ATC/airband, ADS-B aircraft tracking), Sea (AIS vessel tracking, marine VHF) and Land (Amateur Radio), plus network-wide Kestrel Space coverage -- GNSS interference/spoofing detection and geomagnetic band conditions, with dedicated space-domain receiver nodes still to come. You can browse everything the network currently hears from the public console without an account.

What you need

Getting started is deliberately simple. Two broad ways to contribute:

• An SDR (software-defined radio) node: an RTL-SDR or HackRF dongle plus a small computer (a Raspberry Pi is enough) and an antenna. This is the most flexible option and covers ADS-B, AIS, and general RF monitoring.
• A scanner + soundcard node: if you already own a traditional radio scanner, a USB soundcard lets your existing hardware feed its audio into the network instead. No SDR required.

Whichever you have, describe it honestly when you register. The network supports a wide range of hardware and there's no single "correct" setup.

How registration and approval works

Joining is a short, human-reviewed process, not an instant sign-up. This keeps the network trustworthy for everyone listening to it:

1. Register: fill in the registration form: your callsign or a chosen handle, what your node will monitor, your general site location (a 6-character grid square, not your street address, see the privacy note on that page), and a description of your hardware.
2. Review: your registration is held for a short manual review before going live. This isn't automated: a real person checks new registrations before approving them.
3. Approved and connected: once approved, you'll get the credentials and instructions to connect your node into the network (a WireGuard VPN tunnel that works fine even with a home internet connection and no port forwarding, static IP is optional).
4. Configure and go live: after connecting, you configure your node yourself through the self-service portal: which channels/frequencies to share, your node's persona (Air/Sea/Land/etc.), and whether it's a stable "live" feed or still being tested.

Approval timing depends on volunteer availability. There's no guaranteed turnaround, but registrations are generally reviewed promptly.

After you're live

Your node stays under your control the whole time. You can log in any time at the operator login to see your fleet, add or reconfigure channels, and mark a device as "testing" while you're still tuning it in. Nothing you add is shown to the public as "live" until you say so. For the concrete steps from "just approved" to "first channel live", see Your First Sensor.

Transmitting through your hardware

If your node has TX-capable hardware, transmitting through it is off by default on every device -- you decide when and how it's used, not just whether it's used.

• Development: only you can transmit through this node.
• Testing: you, plus any operators you've explicitly added to that node's allowlist.
• Live: open to the wider community, the same way any other TX grant works.

These tiers follow your node's own site status, which you set yourself in the self-service portal -- switching a site from Development through Testing to Live also widens who can transmit through it, without any separate setting to remember.

Each TX-capable device also needs its own frequency range before it can transmit at all. This isn't a permission setting -- it protects your own equipment. An antenna is tuned for a specific range, and transmitting outside it can damage the antenna or the radio behind it. You set that range yourself, per device (a node with more than one TX-capable device, or one device that does both TX and RX, sets each independently), and it's enforced for every transmission through that device -- including admin access -- with no exceptions.

Ready to get started? Register your node, or head back to the live console. Building something with the data? See the public API. Questions first? Contact Derek VK5TCP. Read our Terms & Conditions.