November 16, 2025
Lost in the airwaves
Interactive Spectrum Chart
Radio map has fans swooning—and shouting: “Open source when?”
TLDR: An indie web app turns the invisible radio world into an interactive map you can zoom and toggle. Fans are thrilled and requesting features, while the hottest debate is whether it’ll be open-sourced—key for teachers and tinkerers who want to build and share from it.
A solo creator dropped a clickable “map of the air” that lets you zoom around the invisible world of radio signals—Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and more—and the crowd is eating it up. The link to the magic: spectrum.potatofi.com. One early commenter framed it as a behind‑the‑scenes peek at the app itself, while others praised the slick pan/zoom and the chaos of the 2.4 GHz neighborhood. The dev claims it’s built with plain old web code and even runs on a dusty Windows XP netbook—cue nostalgia and nerd swoons.
But the community’s not just clapping; they’re plotting. Feature wishlists flew in—hover labels, click‑to‑details, Grafana‑style dashboards—while one line stole the show: “I turned everything on and got lost in the spectrum lol,” becoming the unofficial meme of the thread. Then came the drama: the classic internet standoff—is it open source? A top comment asked it bluntly, and suddenly the vibe shifted from toybox glee to license-lawyer energy. The creator politely says don’t copy or host it (for now), hinting a friendlier license might come later and teasing potential backing from their employer. Translation: gorgeous rabbit hole today, bigger plans maybe tomorrow. Until then, fans are bookmarking, star‑gazing, and treating the 2.4 GHz crush like a theme park ride—equal parts science class and candy store.
Key Points
- •A new web app visualizes the radio spectrum with pan/zoom and toggleable technology layers and channel widths.
- •Users can filter by regulatory domains, use shortcuts to jump to bands, and download snapshots of the canvas.
- •The author credits early graphical Wi‑Fi scanner work to Ryan Woodings and Brian Tuttle with inSSIDer 2 at MetaGeek.
- •The app includes an 802.11ah channel chart derived from the 802.11‑2020 spec, validated with Claude.ai.
- •Built in vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript, the tool prioritizes performance (pure JS) and allows educational use but restricts code redistribution.