So Node-RED is a visual programming environment. It’s called ‘flow’ because you link nodes (the colored boxes) together with lines so the action flows from one to the other.

WSJT-X is Dr. Joe Taylor’s data comms app for weak-signal modes like the hugely popular FT-8. It also happens to have a UDP port built in to query it for information of recently received and decoded ‘packets’ between Hams.

I wanted to look into that port and Node-RED lets me with only two nodes. The UDP node and the Debug node.

The next post will get into installing Node-RED. It’s quite easy. For now, all I had to do was drop these to nodes onto the playing field, tell the USD node what port to listen to, in this case 2273, draw a line from  the UDP node to the Debug node and hit the Deploy button. Viola, what WSJT-X is saying on the UDP port comes out in the debug view, ready to be cleaned up and used for whatever I can think of. SMS notification when rare DX comes up on 17 meters?