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Receivers, scanners and SDR dongles
Listening-only gear.
Listening-only gear.
A receiver listens and cannot transmit. No license is needed to own one, and listening is a good way to learn the bands before or after you get your call sign. Four kinds are common: communications receivers, scanners, USB SDR dongles and portable radios.
| Kind | Typically hears | Strengths | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Communications receiver | HF, AM, SSB and CW | Good filtering and stability for weak signals | Often big; usually HF only |
| Scanner | VHF and UHF, mostly FM, AM and some digital | Stores and scans thousands of channels | Rarely handles SSB well |
| SDR dongle | Many MHz at once, tuned by software | Low cost, shows a waterfall | Little filtering, so strong signals can overload it |
| Portable radio | Broadcast, shortwave, weather or air | Pocket-sized | Limited tuning and selectivity |
A ham transceiver also receives, and many cover far beyond the ham bands, so a scanner is not required for casual listening.
A scanner steps through stored channels, called memories, much faster than you could tune by hand. On a quiet channel its squelch stays closed and it moves on. When a signal opens the squelch it stops, plays the audio, and resumes after the signal ends. Searching sweeps a frequency range instead of a stored list. See Memories and scanning and Squelch, CTCSS and DCS.
Amateur bands, repeaters and nets; weather; aircraft and marine channels; beacons that reveal propagation; and your own signal, to check it is clean. For SDR dongles specifically, see SDR listening.