here is how to recieve shortwave radio broadcasts on your PC without any extra hardware or buying anything at all.

there are plenty of websites that host "SDRs"(software defined radio) on them that you can use for free such as linkfanel which has a map of SDR's you can access. you can also search them online on your prefered search engine such as google. I will be using websdr's netherlands receiver as an example through this as it is the one i use the most and like.



you will see something like this on websdr, after you have clicked the button to start the audio. the settings below this are optional, so i have not included them in the picture. If you would like to make the picture larger or move faster, there are waterfall settings that you can change according to your preference.


Highlighted in green, these are where you can adjust the frequency. the colors that range from pink to white are active frequencies. you can click on them individually, or if you know a frequency, or would like to use the buttons in the box to adjust in increments there is the "-" and "+" buttons. In that same box is an important feature, which allows for you to select what mode you are recieving in. It is by default set to USB, which is really commonly used. For example, the popular station UVB-76, or "The Buzzer" at 4625 khz uses this mode. Stations in this mode will be facing right, while LSB faces left. Larger ones that face both ways are Usually AM and FM. CW is very tiny, and used for things like morse. I reccommend testing them out and seeing which ones work on which stations for a better understanding, and you will learn audibly and visually which ones they work with.

Honestly, just "listening" to shortwave doesn't really get more complicated than that. Not hearing anything you want to hear? Switch SDR's. KiwiSDR has many SDR's for viewing, and even extenstions to decode things such as SSTV, morse or FT8/FT4. Even better, you can use websites like priyom to hear scheduled "oddity" stations, and there is also sigidwiki which helps not only with finding what frequencies certain things broadcast to, but how to identify what certain signals are such as CODAR, which can be mistaken for many other things if you don't know what it is. short-wave.info is helpful as well for looking up frequencies that you dont know what they are, and seeing scheduled broadcasts.

If you want to decode for example, SSTV using Websdr rather than Kiwisdr, you may have to use a seperate software in order to do it. MMSSTV is a great program for this. You will need to have Stereo Mix on your computer, which requires for you to have Realtek Audio Drivers installed onto your computer. Your computer also needs to have an audio jack in order for this to work. For SSTV frequencies, 14230 is a popular one, but there is a list of them here on this site .



this is an image of mmsstv. to change to stereo mix go to options,



then go to the misc tab,



then select stereo mix in here. If it is not showing, your computer may not work with stereo mix. Make sure the drivers are enabled, too.
Thank you!

back
home