The Echo SDR mobile app now offers a paid tier featuring recording, voice translation and iCloud support.
We profiled the nifty app, developed by Mark Garrison Jr., earlier this year. It allows iOS devices to connect and stream approximately 2,000 different software-defined radio receivers that are publicly available. That includes the KiwiSDR, OpenWebRX, WebSDR and FMDX webservers.
An Android version is still undergoing development, Garrison said.
For iPhone and iPad, version 1.5, Garrison tells us, introduces a pro tier where listeners can record receptions directly to their iOS devices. Those recordings can then be synced across devices via built-in iCloud support.
Also included in the Echo SDR Pro tier is an interesting feature: live transcription.
Garrison offered us a Pro code, and I tried it out myself.
Once the app downloads its on-device speech engine, activating the feature generates real-time transcripts of whatever programming you are streaming. My iPhone 14 Pro Max took several minutes to download the engine needed to analyze live audio. Once it did so, however, the feature was very responsive on FM signals through the FMDX webserver.
Echo Pro is priced at $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year.
All of Echo’s existing core functionality remains free to use, including listening, tuning and mapping. Garrison told us none of that is changing.
We also found that in Version 1.5, features such as background audio in iOS, including playback controls via the Dynamic Island, are improved.
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