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Web Radio

An internet radio player on the Tab5, for when the bands are quiet. New in this release. It has nothing to do with the QMX — the radio and its I/Q are untouched while you listen.

Opening it

Swipe ← from the right edge for the settings drawer, then tap Web Radio. Closing the player (tap outside, or the Close button) does not stop playback — it is a background task, so you go back to the panadapter and the music keeps going. There is a separate Stop button for that.

Finding a station

The directory comes from radio-browser.info, a community-run list of internet radio streams. Two filters compose together:

  • Search — station name, free text.
  • Genre — a fixed list of the most common genres in the directory (pop, rock, chillout, house, dance, electronic, 80s, 90s, and more), fetched once and filtered locally, so picking a genre costs no extra network round trip and composes instantly with whatever you have typed in search.

Tap a station in the list to play it. The station name and the ICY programme title (what's actually playing right now) are shown, and the title updates on its own as the stream changes track.

Memory slots

Six slots, the same tap/long-press pattern as other memory features in this app:

  • Tap a slot to play the station stored there.
  • Long-press a slot to store whatever is currently playing.

Stored in NVS, so they survive a reboot — this board reboots on every flash, and a memory that didn't would not be much of one.

What it costs

  • Runs over the Tab5's own WiFi — no extra port, no extra setup, no PC.
  • Audio is decoded on the Tab5 (an MP3 decoder running on its own core); measured at roughly 20% of that core once its hot buffers were moved out of slow internal RAM — low enough to leave the panadapter and FT8/CW decoding alongside it undisturbed.
  • Playback is local to the Tab5 — it comes out of the Tab5's own speaker or headphone jack, the same output the rest of the audio features use (see Audio), not streamed to a browser.

Known limitations

  • Latin-1 station names and programme text (Danish, Swedish, German — æøå and friends) render correctly; this is new and worth a report if you see a station name come through as boxes instead.
  • No favourites/sort beyond the six memory slots and the search/genre filter yet.