About OrangeKraken Radio

OrangeKraken Radio treats radio as a planetary sensor. It draws the world's public receivers, the propagation paths they prove, the Sun's effect on the ionosphere, and the orangekraken engine's own antenna on one map — and asks what all of that says about what is happening on Earth right now.

In plain English

Radio does not just carry messages; the way a signal arrives records the state of the sky it crossed. Thousands of public receivers and a shared database of heard signals make that record open to anyone. OrangeKraken Radio reads it in public, from named sources, and holds itself to the engine's rules: freeze first, grade later, never fake a number.

What you'll see: A trustworthy live picture of the ionosphere, forecasts that earn their place by beating climatology, and an anonymous contribution ledger that teaches a small language model what honest observation looks like.

One radio, four depths

A twelve-year-old, a curious adult and a lifelong ham all use the same front door. Start by listening; go as deep as you like.

LISTEN

Tune the world. Click a country, pick News · Music · Talk, or hit Surprise Me — clear internet radio from the Radio Browser directory, played directly from the listed stream. Save favourites on your device or explore radio conditions. Spectrum reading is in the Lab (password required).

EXPLORE

See the radio world change: the Sun's line sweeping the Earth, signals reaching across the planet, radio weather in three honest layers, and what's unusual right now.

CONTRIBUTE

Help OrangeKraken Radio listen to the world. While the node is open your browser does small, real jobs — no account, no installation, stops when you close it.

LAB

Password-gated since 28 September 2026. The workshop underneath: Observe, Discover, Forecast, Instrument, and the independent receiver directory — plus frozen calls, model scores and historical research. Follow the evidence behind the science.

The receiver directory is in the lab (password required). It opens independent receiver websites, where each owner provides tuning controls and sets listening limits.

Provenance — every number traces to a named source

Radio Browser
Community-maintained station metadata and stream URLs. A directory entry is not a rights verification or a guarantee of availability.
The Great Falls node (OrangeKraken Radio's first receiver)
A Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5 logging a frozen band table every five minutes and decoding one WSPR window each pass, with the window's band chosen from the Sun's elevation here. Everything on the Lab's instrument view (password-gated), and every 'ours' count on the LIVE strip, comes from it. City-level location only (DN47).
wspr.live
The public WSPR spot database. Every propagation arc on the Explore map is a real report: who transmitted, from which grid, heard by whom, at what signal-to-noise.
NOAA SWPC
The Space Weather Prediction Center's Kp and F10.7 feeds — the geomagnetic disturbance index and the solar radio flux that set the ionosphere's mood.
Public KiwiSDR directory
Independent receivers listed in our lab directory. Listening opens the receiver owner’s website; we do not relay its audio.
Ionosondes BC840 / IF843
NOAA/GIRO vertical sounders at Boulder, CO and Idaho National Lab. Their foF2 readings grade the Great Falls node's own daily calls.
KGTF (NWS Great Falls)
Surface weather at the airport nearest the Great Falls node's antenna — the tropospheric covariate for the VHF cells.

▸Learn more

Two roads bring engine data here: a live, token-gated feed from the lab, and a snapshot committed into this site's repository by the engine's publisher. When the live feed is down, you see the snapshot and a label saying so. Nothing is invented to fill a gap.

Honesty rules

1Honest animation. Something on this site moves only when real, fresh data is moving. A stale feed is a still picture with a label saying so. Nothing pulses for decoration, and if your system asks for reduced motion, everything holds still.
2Honest empty. When a feature's data source is not built yet, you see the bar it has to clear and the words 'not yet' — never a mock-up pretending to be data. The LIVE strip at the bottom never shows a number it did not count.
3Nothing self-incorporates. Forecasts are frozen before the window opens and graded after it closes; a model only replaces climatology when its graded record is better. Anomalies are flagged for a person to look at, never promoted into a claim on their own.
4Plain language, on demand. Anything technical has a “Learn more” you can open for a friendly, understandable explanation — never jargon for its own sake, never dumbed down.
5No accounts, no cookies, no fingerprinting. There is nothing to sign up for. Favourites and preferences stay in local browser storage. See the privacy page for details of third-party connections and voluntary submissions.
6City-level location. OrangeKraken Radio's first node is in Great Falls, Montana, grid square DN47 — and city-level is as precise as any node's location, including yours, will ever be shown.
7The instrument is the source of truth. OrangeKraken Radio only draws what its receiver, the public WSPR database and the space-weather feeds actually recorded. Nothing on the site is typed in by hand.

Privacy

Listening needs no account. Favourites and preferences are stored on your device. Broadcasters receive your IP address when you play their stream. See our privacy page for station requests and usage statistics. If you start a node, the session lives in your browser's sessionStorage and is gone when the tab closes. What the durable ledger keeps is the de-identified observation itself — the task, the answer, the language, the disagreement — never who you are, where you are, or which device you used.

▸Learn more

“Ephemeral” means the node session exists only while the tab is open. Closing it discards everything except the anonymous results that were already submitted.

The OKLM link

Human-labelled node contributions that two independent sessions agree on are eligible for an auditable training ledger for OKLM — the OrangeKraken language model programme, a small model trained on the engine's own graded record rather than on the open web. Machine integrity checks are counted but never trained on. Every example carries its task, its verification status and its provenance, so the model's training data can be inspected line by line.

Glossary

▸What do these words mean?

Propagation — How a radio wave gets from transmitter to receiver: straight along the ground, bounced off the ionosphere, bent through the lower atmosphere, or scattered. The whole subject of this site.

Ionosphere — A layer of the upper atmosphere (about 60–1,000 km up) that sunlight turns into a weak electrical mirror. Shortwave radio bounces off it, which is why a signal from Montana can land in Japan. Its height and strength change with the Sun, the hour and the season.

F-layer — The highest and most important ionospheric layer (~150–500 km). It is what carries long-distance shortwave. By day it splits into F1 and F2; at night only F2 survives, and it is the F2 layer that decides how far a signal can reach after dark.

foF2 — The critical frequency of the F2 layer, measured by an ionosonde (a radar pointed straight up). Anything below foF2 bounces back even when fired vertically; it is the single best number for how strong the mirror overhead is right now.

MUF (maximum usable frequency) — The highest frequency that will still bounce between two given places at this moment. Above it, the signal punches through the ionosphere into space. It rises by day, falls at night and climbs across the solar cycle.

WSPR — Weak Signal Propagation Reporter — thousands of hobby transmitters send a tiny, slow, timestamped signal on fixed frequencies, and every receiver that decodes one reports it to a shared public database. Each report is one proven radio path: who, from where, heard where, how strongly. We read that database, and our own receiver adds its reports to it.

SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) — How far a signal stands above the background hiss, in decibels. 0 dB means signal and noise are equal; each +10 dB is ten times the power. WSPR decodes down to about −30 dB — well below what an ear could hear.

Kp index — A 0–9 scale of how disturbed Earth's magnetic field is, published every three hours by NOAA. Kp 0–2 is quiet; Kp 5+ is a geomagnetic storm, which usually degrades high-latitude shortwave and can light the aurora.

F10.7 solar flux — The Sun's radio brightness at 10.7 cm wavelength, measured daily. It tracks solar activity well: high F10.7 means a more ionised ionosphere and higher usable frequencies. A level, not a rhythm.

Solar terminator — The line on the globe separating day from night. The ionosphere changes fastest right along it, so signals that cross it — or run along it — often behave unusually for a short while around sunrise and sunset (the 'grey line').

Sporadic-E — Short-lived, dense patches in the E-layer (~100 km up), most common in early summer. They reflect VHF frequencies that normally go straight through, so a 50 MHz signal can suddenly reach 1,500 km — and vanish minutes later.

Skip — A bounced path — the signal rises, reflects off the ionosphere and comes down far away. The ground between the transmitter and the first landing point hears nothing: the 'skip zone'.

Spectrum — Signal strength plotted against frequency at one instant. A peak is a station; the flat floor between peaks is the noise the receiver hears when nothing is there.

Waterfall — A picture of radio over time: each row is one moment's spectrum, colour is strength, and rows scroll down like water. Signals show as vertical streaks; you can see a band open or a broadcaster sign on.

SDR (software-defined radio) — A receiver where the radio work happens in software: a small USB stick digitises a wide slice of the spectrum and a computer does the tuning and decoding. Ours is a Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5 in Great Falls, Montana.

Beacon — A transmitter that sends a known signal from a known place on a schedule, so anyone can use it as a ruler. WWV (Colorado), WWVH (Hawaii) and CHU (Ottawa) are time-signal stations we use exactly this way.

Carrier — The steady, unmodulated tone a transmitter sits on. A time-signal station's carrier is a clean, constant line in the spectrum, which makes it a perfect thing to measure day after day.

Maidenhead grid — The Maidenhead locator: the world cut into squares named with letters and numbers (DN47 is the square that holds Great Falls). Radio amateurs report locations this way, so every WSPR report already carries a rough position.

dB (decibel) — The decibel, a logarithmic unit for comparing power. +3 dB is double, +10 dB is ten times, +20 dB is a hundred times. Radio uses it because signals span an enormous range.

Sferics — The radio crackle of lightning. Every strike is a broadband pulse that can be heard thousands of kilometres away at very low frequencies — a way to sense thunderstorms with an antenna instead of a satellite.

Tropospheric ducting — When temperature and humidity layer the lower atmosphere just right, VHF and UHF signals get trapped between layers and carried far beyond the horizon — sometimes across a sea. Weather, not the ionosphere, causes it.