A station is told from hiss by evidence, not by loudness.

The whole app, in one picture

Everything the page does, top to bottom, with nothing cropped away: the frequency, the transport buttons, the volume, the scan's three-pass panel with the spectrum it actually measured, and the two lists it produced. This is the page as it stands on the machine it was written on — no radio is plugged in, so it says exactly that, refuses to capture anything, and shows the last scan rather than pretending.

Why the list is short

A scan that ranks by loudness is the easiest thing to write and the least useful: on a real receiver the noise floor is loud too, and a strong station's skirt reaches half a megahertz either side. So this one asks a question with a factual answer instead.

The failure it refuses to make

Unplug a USB input and Linux does not report an error — it moves the streams that pointed at it to the default input, which is usually the built-in microphone. That was measured, not imagined: the capture read the room, a loopback played the room back into the speakers at rising volume, and a scan would have swept the room and called it the band.

• It will not capture or play unless its named input is in the audio server's own list.
• It removes any loopback still pointing at a source that has gone.
• A missing radio is reported as a missing radio — never answered with the microphone.

Run it

One Python file, the standard library only, in a small image. Your host supplies three things a container cannot: a working kernel driver for the stick, the audio server it plays through, and that server's socket.

With docker compose

cd usb-fm-radio
docker compose up -d --build
# open http://127.0.0.1:8150/

Anything you would edit, override from the shell: RADIO_PORT=9000 docker compose up -d · RADIO_DEVICE=/dev/radio1 · RADIO_SOURCE=alsa_input.usb-…. docker compose down keeps your saved stations; down -v throws them away.

With plain docker

docker build -t usb-fm-radio .
docker run -d --name usb-fm-radio \
  --device /dev/radio0:/dev/radio0 \
  -p 8150:8150 \
  -e RADIO_BIND=0.0.0.0 \
  -e RADIO_DATA=/data \
  -e PULSE_SERVER=unix:/pulse/native \
  -e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/pulse \
  -v usb-fm-radio-data:/data \
  -v "${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-/run/user/$(id -u)}/pulse/native:/pulse/native" \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  usb-fm-radio

RADIO_BIND=0.0.0.0 is not optional in a container — a published port arrives from outside the container's own loopback, so an app listening on 127.0.0.1 is unreachable whatever -p says. If your audio server does not use a cookie, leave the cookie mount out: on a PipeWire machine Docker will create a directory where the file should be, and the server then rejects every client.

When it refuses to start

• error gathering device information while adding custom device "/dev/radio0" — Docker will not start at all when a device path is missing. Drop --device (compose: comment the line out) to read the page without a radio.
• The page loads and says there is no radio — the tuner is there but the container cannot see it. Check the host with ls -l /dev/radio0 and pass it in.
• A station is found and nothing plays — the audio socket or the cookie is wrong. Check the host with ls -l ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-/run/user/$(id -u)}/pulse/native.

Settings

What it heard here

The sixteen carriers this scan called High reception, in frequency order, exactly as the page lists them — frequency, call sign, city and format, with the rate the pilot held and how far it stood above the noise. Same receiver, same antenna, indoors.

Twelve more carriers were heard but not held often enough to be called stations, and they are listed separately as Low reception rather than mixed in. The station table inside the program — frequency, call sign, city, format — was compiled from Wikipedia's lists of radio stations, which is why it is credited under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Questions worth asking

Why does it find fewer stations than my car radio?

Because it only lists a channel when the pilot is really there. A car radio will play a hiss you can sit through — this list is meant to be short and trustworthy rather than long and partly wrong.

Does it send my listening anywhere?

No. It runs on your machine, serves one page on your own loopback address, and talks to nothing on the internet. There is no account and no cloud. The only thing on this page that could ever contact anyone is the analytics tag, and it loads only if you allow it.

Which radios does it work with?

Any receiver the Linux kernel already exposes as a V4L2 radio device at /dev/radio0 — the driver, not the brand, decides. The container cannot load a kernel module, so it has to be working on the host already. The USB receivers it can drive — with their USB IDs — are listed under USB devices it can drive.

What is it written in?

One Python file and nothing else — no pip installs, no numpy, no framework. The maths it needs (a Goertzel filter for the pilot and a small FFT for the spectrum) is written out by hand.

Can I copy it?

Yes. It is MIT licensed — copy it, change it, ship it, sell it, keeping the copyright notice. One obligation rides alongside it: the station table came from Wikipedia and stays under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Privacy, plainly

The program collects nothing and sends nothing. It reads your radio device, plays the audio through your own audio server, and writes your saved stations to a file you chose. This page is where a choice exists, and it is yours: there is no analytics script in this document at all — the tag is created by consent.js and only after you answer yes. If you say no, this page makes zero requests to Google, and you can change your mind at any time from Cookie settings in the footer. If you allow it, the page counts visits and nothing else: no profile is built, no advertising identifier is read, and nothing is sold.

One thing on this page sends without asking, and here is why that is not a loophole. If the page throws where you are, it reports the error to this site — to /api/fault on this same address, nowhere else — so that a breakage on your machine can be found instead of staying invisible for ever. It sets no cookie and keeps nothing: what it has already sent is a variable that dies with the tab. It carries no visitor id, no browser string and no referrer, and every URL in it is stripped of its query, so nothing you typed into an address bar travels.