Rig Skin: Give OpenWebRX+ the Look and Feel of a Real Radio

I use OpenWebRX+ for shortwave listening quite often, mainly when I’m away from home.

I am a big fan of OpenWebRX+: it is fast, stable, and puts a capable SDR receiver wherever I happen to be.

There was just one thing that never quite clicked with me: the default controls.

Tuning with sliders and frequency digits is perfectly efficient, but I would like a rotating dial

Since I am the main user of my own receiver, I decided it should feel more like my radio.

So I built rig_skin: an OpenWebRX+ plugin that transforms the receiver panel into a dark, classic rig-style front panel.

What you get#

• VFO dial. Use the scroll wheel for tuning. The dial follows the tuning step selected in OpenWebRX+.
• rig-style LCD. Amber frequency digits, plus live readouts for the mode, the filter width (FIL) and the tuning step (TS), so the screen always tells you what one click of the dial will do.
• S-meter with peak hold, spanning the full width of the display, with proper meter ballistics.
• audio scope, like a modern high-end hardware rig screen. The audio spectrum with a scrolling waterfall on the left, an oscilloscope waveform on the right, complete with graticules and a labeled kHz axis. It is a genuine tuning aid: on SSB you can see the voice energy sit in the passband, on CW the tone spike lands right where it should. Click the S-meter to show or hide it.
• Front panel keys, each with a status LED:
  • NR toggles noise reduction.
  • LOCK freezes the dial against accidental tuning, with a blinking LED.
  • TS opens the tuning step picker, on a phone it is the native selection wheel.
  • SCAN runs the bookmark scanner, a feature the stock UI hides behind a right-click.
  • SQL switches the squelch on with an automatically chosen level, and off again.
  • MW button to write a frequency in memory/bookmark.
• Touch support. The dial rotate on phones and tablets.

Try it#

Add the plugin to your receiver in plugins/receiver/init.js:

Plugins.load('https://aganet.github.io/openwebrxplus-rig-skin/receiver/rig_skin/rig_skin.js');

The source code and the full installation guide (local and Docker) are on GitHub: github.com/aganet/openwebrxplus-rig-skin.

MIT license. Feedback, bug reports, and pull requests are welcome.

If you use OpenWebRX+ and prefer the feel of a traditional radio interface, give rig_skin a try.

Update, July 2026#

rig_skin has grown a lot since I wrote this. The highlights:

A band scope in the LCD. A narrow spectrum and waterfall centered on the tuned frequency, like the center mode scope on a rig. Click it to tune (about 70 Hz per pixel), scroll it to step, and it uses the same colors and levels as the main waterfall with an averaged trace, so weak signals are easy to spot and click. On wide FM the span grows so the signal stays a focused slice.

A propagation screen. The PROP key opens a second LCD with band conditions computed from NOAA data, the live MUF world map from prop.kc2g.com, and my favourite: an NCDXF/IARU beacon tracker. The 18 beacons transmit in a fixed UTC rotation, so the rig always knows which beacon is on 14.100, 18.110, 21.150, 24.930 and 28.200 at this very second. Click a frequency, sit on it, and the row shows your live S reading while the world takes turns calling you. Three minutes on 14.100 tells you more about 20 m than any prediction chart.

A satellite screen. The SAT key lists the next passes over your own receiver location: ISS, the FM birds, RS-44, AO-7 (whose 10 m downlink you can hear on an HF antenna) and the Meteor weather satellites, with countdowns, elevation, and a NOW marker during a pass. Click the frequency and the receiver jumps there with the right mode. The orbits are computed in your browser.

More keys, better dial. The dial now has three key columns: MUTE, NR and TS on the left, LOCK, SQL and MW in the middle, SCAN, PROP, SAT and AUTO on the right. AUTO snaps the VFO onto the strongest nearby signal, one press instead of fine tuning by hand. TS gained an Auto entry that picks the step from the mode. Small - / + and arrow key pairs zoom and page the waterfall, no more pinching on a phone. One wheel notch is now exactly one tuning step on any mouse.

Wide mode. On a big screen a chevron expands the rig into a two column face, readouts left, scopes right, with extra LCD readouts: current band, S units, squelch, mute and the UTC clock.

The LCD also switched from amber to white digits with the mode on a blue badge, closer to a modern rig screen, and the whole panel now behaves on phones.