For ham radio FT-8 protocol I use WSJT-X, GridWatcher and some other apps but getting the UPD feed from WSJT-X to all it's fans was a problem to me. It doesn't do multi-cast (reasonable as it can do horrible things to a network) but if I set up a chain any one program can knock the whole system over. Hence I decided to write my own UPD dispatcher that is a host and takes in all the WSJT-X messages and then posts them off as a group of clients to all the users and if any one of them stops responding it just retries (every 5 seconds) it until it comes back.
I run it on the same PC as WSJT-X and Gridwatcher so it is set to receive on port 2237, which is the WSJT-X default, and it relays the messages to Gridwatcher on 127.0.0.1:2238, so that needs re-configuring, and I have another device on my home network at 192.169.1.219:2237. See the screenshot below.
It was a bit messy to relearn ol' WebSockets again after so many years but it works now. The transaction viewer is deliberatly simple-minded. It just displays the ascii characters and collapses any number of non-ascii ones into a singe dot. It works enough to test that the system is moving the right stuff. It is not intended to be WSJT-X specific and will take any old UDP stream and honest broker it onwards...
It does simple reverse messaging, taking any messages from the hosts and pumping them back to the original client, but there is no sense in which it provides separate identities or even ordering.
It is fully multi-threaded with thread safe queues so all the sub-systems run independently and sequentially.
It saves its configuration file in your 'roaming' folder so it is reasonably portable.
I made it remember its place on the screen to fall in with the radio apps but it could just as well be setup to start minimised.
It seems to work OK and you can switch the radio apps in and out at will and within a few seconds they are back up and running again.
I have added 'reader' that can be set up as another host and will dump certain WSJT-X packets to a text file. It is intended as a cut-and-stick source for things that would use those packets to do something useful for me. Currently it is coded to read from port 2239 but I'll sort out that later...
I also put two powershall scripts in the 'Other FT-8 items' folder. ft-8.ps1 is run by an icon on my desktop to start the system up and that also starts off ft-8-mod.ps1 that watches for the 'Log QSO' window and goes 'Bong' so I don't miss anything when calling CQ into the darkness. include.ps1 is dot included into my $profile to provide the extra PowerShell functions I want.
The .msi file contains Dispatcher and reader and is tested on current Windows 11.
Usual disclaimers apply. Use at your own risk. May cause cancer in rats.