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Legal

Third-party notices

Open-source software, public data, models and libraries included in or used by SDRSowa for Windows. The Android app lists its own in Settings > About.

Plain text version[email protected]

Source code

pl_mpeg: MPEG-1 Audio Layer II decoder (ported to C#)

src/SDRSowa.Core/Dab/Mp2Decoder.cs is a C# port of the MP2 decoder in pl_mpeg, which is itself based on kjmp2 by Martin J. Fiedler. SDRSowa changes: requantisation follows ISO/IEC 11172-3 (levels divided by L instead of L+1), with the output level calibrated accordingly.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019 Dominic Szablewski - https://phoboslab.org

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

ft8_lib: FT8 / FT4 encoder and decoder (ported to C#, Windows app)

The FT8 / FT4 message packing, CRC, LDPC code, encoder and the waterfall, Costas sync score and candidate search of the decoder are a C# port of ft8_lib by Karlis Goba. SDRSowa adds candidate refinement on complex baseband, coherent and non-coherent soft bit metrics, subtraction of decoded signals with further passes and the UTC slot handling. The FT8 and FT4 protocols were designed by Joe Taylor (K1JT), Steve Franke (K9AN) and Bill Somerville (G4WJS) for their program; none of that program's (GPL) code is included.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2018 Kārlis Goba

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

MeshCore: packet format and public channel key (Mesh page, Windows app)

The MeshCore packet reading follows the packet format, payload layouts, MAC and cipher of MeshCore by Scott Powell / rippleradios.com and uses its public channel key; written anew, receive only. The LoRa receiver is SDRSowa's own code: the LoRa coding facts come from J. Tapparel et al. (EPFL), "An Open-Source LoRa Physical Layer Prototype on GNU Radio" (2020), and the Meshtastic packet facts from the Meshtastic documentation and protocol definitions; no gr-lora_sdr or Meshtastic (GPL) code is included.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Scott Powell / rippleradios.com

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Data

  • GeoNames cities1000 and country names (the offline place list for finding the antenna location by name): Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, geonames.org
  • Natural Earth 1:110m coastline and 1:50m land, lakes, rivers, borders, roads and populated places (the offline world map): public domain, naturalearthdata.com
  • OpenStreetMap street map tiles (both apps): © OpenStreetMap contributors; data under the Open Database License (ODbL), tiles under CC BY-SA 2.0, openstreetmap.org/copyright
  • Sentinel-2 cloudless 2017 satellite map tiles by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2017): Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (this 2017 edition; later editions are non-commercial), cloudless.eox.at
  • NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), Blue Marble map tiles and the offline basemap package: public domain, earthdata.nasa.gov/gibs
  • tar1090-db aircraft registry (Mictronics database, by wiedehopf), downloaded when chosen, only from github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090-db; the source states no licence, so SDRSowa does not republish it
  • EiBi shortwave schedules (Eike Bierwirth, eibispace.de), bundled and updated weekly: free to use, copy and distribute, also in third-party software
  • OpenFlights airline names, downloaded when chosen: Open Database License 1.0, openflights.org
  • planespotters.net aircraft photos (credited and linked on each photo) and adsbdb.com routes, looked up online when an aircraft is selected
  • SatNOGS DB transmitter data (downloaded at run time, cached): CC BY-SA 4.0, db.satnogs.org
  • CelesTrak orbital elements (downloaded at run time, cached): celestrak.org

Models (bundled)

Models (downloaded when chosen)

  • OpenAI Whisper Tiny, Base, Small, Medium and Large-v3 Turbo, ggml conversion from whisper.cpp: MIT License, github.com/openai/whisper
  • Moonshine Tiny and Base (English) by Useful Sensors, Inc. (dba Moonshine AI), ONNX exports from onnx-community: MIT License, github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine. SDRSowa runs them with its own code; the non-English Moonshine models (Community License) are not used.
  • Supertonic 3 natural voices by Supertone Inc.: model under the BigScience Open RAIL-M licence (its use restrictions, paragraph 5 and Attachment A, are part of the SDRSowa licence: licence, point 5), example code under the MIT License, huggingface.co/supertone-oss-archive/supertonic-3. SDRSowa runs it with its own code; speech made with it is labelled as a computer voice.
  • M2M100 418M translator by Meta AI (ONNX conversion by Xenova): MIT License, huggingface.co/facebook/m2m100_418M
  • YAMNet speech / music detector by Google (ONNX conversion by zeropointnine): Apache-2.0, tensorflow/models

Tools downloaded on request

Zadig 2.9 (Pete Batard / Akeo Consulting, from libwdi 1.5.1), downloaded and started only when you ask to install the USB driver: GNU General Public License v3. Its complete source (libwdi-1.5.1-source.zip) is on sdrsowa.com next to it. zadig.akeo.ie

The installer

Inno Setup 6.7 makes the SDRSowa setup and its uninstaller. Copyright (C) 1997-2026 Jordan Russell; portions Copyright (C) 2000-2026 Martijn Laan. All rights reserved. Used under the Inno Setup License. jrsoftware.org

libwdi 1.5.1 (Pete Batard and contributors): the setup runs its example program wdi-simple.exe to install the WinUSB driver for RTL-SDR sticks; a copy is in the program's tools folder. GNU Lesser General Public License v3 or later. wdi-simple.exe is a separate program built from the unchanged libwdi 1.5.1 source with a WinUSB-only, 64-bit build configuration; that source, the configuration and the build script: libwdi-1.5.1-pulsesdr-src.zip, or write to [email protected]. It contains Microsoft's WinUSB coinstallers (WdfCoInstaller01011.dll, WinUSBCoInstaller2.dll, Windows Driver Kit redistributables, signed by Microsoft). github.com/pbatard/libwdi

Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (vcruntime140.dll, vcruntime140_1.dll, msvcp140.dll, msvcp140_1.dll, vcomp140.dll): Microsoft's runtime for Whisper and ONNX Runtime, shipped next to the program as Microsoft allows for these redistributable files. The setup installs the full redistributable (vc_redist.x64.exe, inside the setup) when it is missing.

Libraries

  • NuGet packages: Avalonia (MIT), CommunityToolkit.Mvvm (MIT), Microsoft.Data.Sqlite (MIT), SQLitePCLRaw (Apache-2.0) with SQLite (public domain), Microsoft.ML.OnnxRuntime (MIT), Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers (MIT) with Google.Protobuf (BSD-3-Clause), NAudio.WinMM and NAudio.Core (MIT), Whisper.net and whisper.cpp / ggml (MIT), MicroCom.Runtime (MIT), Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream (MIT).
  • Shipped with Avalonia: SkiaSharp (MIT) and Skia (BSD-3-Clause), HarfBuzzSharp (MIT) and HarfBuzz (Old MIT), ANGLE (BSD-3-Clause), the Inter font (SIL Open Font License 1.1).

Codecs (DAB+ audio, the DATV picture and sound, and the MP3 network stream)

SDRSowa includes no audio or video codecs (from 2026-10-16). DAB+ sound, DATV and the MP3 stream use the codecs already on your system; without one, SDRSowa says that your system cannot decode it. Those codecs are under their own licences.

Protocol references

Protocol knowledge was cross-checked against public documentation and public open-source programs and drivers; no code from GPL projects is included.