Regarding SDR, there’s a variety of software for different purposes, but some good starting points I can think of are:

Gqrx is great for receiving and listening. Other options are available.

GNU Radio was used for making Gqrx. Maybe you could make something with it too? According to themselves, it is a free & open-source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios. It can be used with readily-available low-cost external RF hardware to create software-defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation-like environment. It is widely used in research, industry, academia, government, and hobbyist environments to support both wireless communications research and real-world radio systems.

There are also other applications made for encoding and decoding various digital modes, just like the SSTV apps for Android, but I don’t remember their names right now. I remember that some of them work by decoding the demodulated audio (e.g. audio output from Gqrx or a signal from an external source) so for some of those you will probably need some audio routing software, as these are not made for the receiving or transmitting radio but just for encoding/decoding digital modes to/from audio.

Since I’ve only had receivers, I’m unsure what the coolest software for modulation and transmission is, but here’s at least something to get you started with SDR reception.

While you’re looking for a radio and waiting for it to arrive, you could prepare yourself for further exploration of SSTV modes through these two apps on F-Droid:

SSTV Encoder

Robot36

Running both at the same time, you can encode, transmit (as audio), receive and decode on the same device (or on two devices that can hear each other). You could also feed the audio output into the radio you’re getting and transmit it over the air, or receive and decode other SSTV transmissions. When testing it over audio on local device(s), it’s always good fun to distort the images (as if they weren’t distorted enough already) by making weird noises over the audio signal, where different frequencies and amplitudes of course will result in different colors and patterns, depending on the mode etc.

If you’re into computers, you could even consider buying some SDR (Software Defined Radio) transceiver instead/too. It’s basically a radio tuner you connect through USB and encode/decode through software, so you’ll be able to encode and transmit from your devices, and to receive and apply DSP, decode digital modes, listen, record or whatever you want to do with it. Note that some (like RTL-SDR) can only receive but not transmit. I believe the HackRF does both, but it’s been a while since I looked into it, and I’ve only ever had RTL-SDR-based receivers. There’s a lot to look into here!

Btw, have you considered searching for other local or competing options instead of going straight to Amazon for a ham radio – maybe even something used that does the job? I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of used ham equipment to find on online second-hand marketplaces, ham radio groups on facebook, something related to the national member society representing your country at IARU or ask the members of some local ham radio club?

I’ll catch your SSTV transmission or something equally as cool some day, yo!

Re-reading my previous comment, I think I gave you some incorrect information. Let me try again.

If you want to use a VPN and stay/become connectable to peers in P2P apps such as torrent clients, you need one of the few VPNs that support port forwarding. So far, so good.

However, I think I was wrong about the configuration. It’s correct that you need to define a port number in your torrent client’s settings, but when using a VPN, your router’s port forwarding configuration is irrelevant, opposing to what I previously said. Instead, somewhere in your VPN’s settings or when logged in on the VPN provider’s website, you should set the same port number as in your torrent client. If the provider already assigned some port number to you, copy that to your torrent client config instead. Also look into how to bind your torrent client to your VPN so no traffic escapes if the VPN disconnects.

The router admin dashboard is only relevant for traffic that doesn’t go through the VPN, so probably irrelevant for your torrenting, and you can only forward ports if you have your own public IP, rather than a shared one (CGNAT). I don’t know which you have or if you’ll ever need one. Ask your ISP if you need a public IP for something on your network that doesn’t go through the VPN, e.g. some game server. While some ISPs give every customer a public IP, others sell it as an add-on for a small monthly fee if the technology (e.g. fiber) allows it, but only some technologies do. But as I said, the router port config doesn’t matter when torrenting through the VPN.

Regarding SOCKS5, I found this description of it by in this blog post by ExpressVPN:

A SOCKS proxy acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. Instead of your network packets being sent directly to their destination, they are first routed through the proxy server. The proxy then forwards those requests on your behalf, replacing your IP address with its own.

So no, it’s not. From some quick searches, it seems possible use a SOCKS proxy from your VPN provider for your torrent client in order to hide your real IP from other peers, but since I can’t find any proof of port forwarding being possible through such a proxy, this probably wont make you connectable…

Are we talking about Wordfeud or is there another online Scrabble game?

I’m not the one you’re asking, but it seems to be this repo on Github and I read that it works because Jellyfin does/can(?) expose a Subsonic API.

Then what you need is a VPN that supports port forwarding. There are very few, but I bet you can find a thread somewhere on Lemmy discussing the options you have. Then, if I’m not mistaken, you still need to know/set the port number in your torrent client and config the router correctly, probably through its admin site which you’ll find on the router’s IP in the browser. If you don’t know the login (and admin/admin doesn’t work) you can find the default credentials by searching the web for your router model number + admin login. When logged in, you can set new admin login credentials if you don’t want other users of your local network to be able to access or change the config settings.

Check the open port number of your torrent client – which should also be set in your router’s port forwarding or firewall config (alternatively enable UPnP in the router config to let it handle such things for you).

You can use a utility like CanYouSeeMe.org to check if it’s correctly configured.

EDIT If you can’t make it work, you might be behind double NAT, sharing varying IPs with multiple other of the ISP’s customers at once. In that case, you’ll need to find one of the few trustworthy VPN providers that support port forwarding to get connectable, as it’s called, and be able to connect to all peers no matter if they’re connectable or not. Alternatively, rent a connectable seedbox in the cloud.

Set a different download directory for those, or put a label on them. That’ll make it easier to untangle and efficiently delete all those you don’t want to keep.

r/TV_NCA on reddit has such things… Though, that one is a members-only subreddit, so you will need a reddit account to get approved by a mod of the sub. I read somewhere that they’ll accept most membership requests - but only if the account has some karma…

The private torrent tracker TVCUK has it too.

I also saw a filehost link posted on a private Discord server - which is a different annoying obstacle in itself, and I’m not sure if I should share more details about that server in a public comment like this, though it is really great for UK, AU, NZ stuff. Though, if you can join r/TV_NCA a lot of the same stuff is available there too.

Other related public subreddits now we’re at it:

• r/TellyBum2 for UK stuff (but low activity)
• r/DownUnderTV and r/RooTV for AU/NZ stuff
• r/panelshow for various panelshows of the world but mainly UK ones
• r/notpanelshow for content featuring UK panelshow regulars but isn’t a panelshow

I sent you a private message.

I use airvpn for torrents but depending on your European country you might not be able to.

Why would it not be an option in some countries? Are you saying it’s illegal or impossible to encrypt any traffic through a VPN while being in some of the countries, or what’s the matter?

Wont they take your money before the VPN is disabled/undetected?

MacOS uses the APFS file system format nowadays, and used HFS+ before that. FAT and ExFAT formats are supported too. However, the NTFS format needs third party software to work.

The very newly released Deepseek R1 “reasoning model” from China beats OpenAI’s o1 model on multiple areas, it seems – and you can even see all the steps of the pre-answering “thinking” that’s hidden from the user in o1. It’s a huge model, but it (and the paper about it) will probably positively impact future “open source” models in general, now the “thinking” cat’s outta the bag. Though, it can’t think about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan’s autonomy – but many derivative models will probably be modified to effectively remove such Chinese censorship.

Do you know, is this another tax additional to “blankmedieafgiften” (“blank media tax” or “private copying levy”), or is it the same tax under a different name?

My guess is it’s probably a national cultural tradition affected by previous or existing French laws and rightsholder practices regarding different common ways of “sailing”, making DDL from filehosts through debrid services a preferred choice over e.g. p2p methods like torrents, ed2k, gnutella etc. I’m pretty sure the filehosts+torrents products combo are a newer addition to debrid services without having used them myself. No idea about what their actual situation is and has been - but I know that some torrent trackers for French content currently exist today too.

Here are some alternatives to look into: https://slrpnk.net/post/15456722

Here are some other options to consider: https://slrpnk.net/post/15456722

Which is French too, and will probably go the same way as RD sooner rather than later…

Have a look at SmartTube. You’ll have to transfer the apk to your AndroidTV and sideload it.