Supported Hardware¶

AetherSDR works with any FlexRadio transceiver (the supported target) and, on an experimental basis, with a growing list of other radio families that ride the vendor-neutral IRadioBackend seam.

Supported: FlexRadio¶

FLEX-6000 series — FLEX-6300, 6400, 6400M, 6500, 6600, 6600M, 6700
FLEX-8000 series — FLEX-8400, 8400M, 8600, 8600M
Aurora series — AU-510, 510M, 520, 520M
ML-, CL-, and RT-series devices

The active test target is the FLEX-8600 on firmware 4.2.18 (SmartSDR protocol v1.4.0.0). Earlier 4.x firmware works; v3.x is unsupported.

External devices¶

Outside the radio seam, AetherSDR also controls:

PGXL (Power Genius XL) amplifier and TGXL (Tuner Genius XL) tuner
ACOM S-series amplifiers (serial / ser2net)
SPE Expert amplifiers — 1.3K-FA / 1.5K-FA / 2K-FA (serial / ser2net TCP)
VK3AMP amplifiers — 600 W / 1000 W / 2000 W (TCP control + UDP telemetry)

Experimental radio families¶

Two additional families are under active development. Neither is a supported family yet, and FlexRadio remains the supported target:

Hermes-Lite 2 — a low-cost open-source SDR. Four receivers, SSB/CW/RTTY/AX.25, hardware-filter band switching, and a host-side impulse noise blanker.
Networked Icom — CI-V over the RS-BA1 UDP transport, brought up on the IC-705 and completed against a live IC-7300MK2.

Both are opt-in and clearly marked in the UI: AetherSDR shows a notice banner the first time you connect one, and they are only reachable through the manual "Connect to Radio" flow.

No radio at all?¶

Demo mode runs the full UI against a synthetic backend that generates its own receive audio and spectrum — no hardware required.