R862 Skywave

R862 Skywave is a high-power broadcasting station in a plug-in, now on your iPhone and iPad. Your audio is the program.

R862 encodes the program, drives it through the station's modulator, water-cooled RCA 862 power tubes, the giants of the high-power stations of the 1930s, and puts it on the air. R862 is also the receiver at the other end: it decodes the signal, so you hear what went out. The receiver is perfect: no static, no fading, no tuning error and no narrow radio bandwidth. The character comes from the transmitter.

Now you run it. Drive it hard, starve its tubes to save on the power bill, mismatch the pair, let the supply sag. This is that station... and you own it!

Use it as an AUv3 plug-in in your favorite host (Logic Pro, GarageBand, AUM, Cubasis and more) or as a standalone app processing live sound from your microphone.

KEY FEATURES:
- The tube pair solved as a circuit: a tube law anchored to the 862's published ratings, the load it drives, grid current and plate bottoming
- DRIVE and DEPTH: the sound gets denser and dirtier, never louder
- BIAS from a freshly calibrated transmitter to a cold, worn one, with crossover grain on the decays
- TUBE MISMATCH: an unequal pair brings back the even harmonics as warmth and body
- SAG: a soft supply that dips on loud passages and recovers, so the level breathes with the program
- MIX from AIR to LINE, used like parallel compression
- MATCH sets OUT TRIM so the output plays as loud as your input
- Five meters across the top: MOD. m, MOD. %, a two-needle VU with CAL, PLATE kV and MISMATCH, plus the limit lamps
- A round scope with three views, X-Y DOTS, X-Y LINE and TRANSFER, plus a correlation meter
- Mono and stereo
- 32 factory presets in seven folders (Bass, Brass, Bus, Drums, Guitar, Keys and Vocals), with descriptions, tags, search and favorites
- A/B slots with copy
- Made for touch: the help shows while you touch a control, a long-press opens the preset menus, and a Link In & Out Trim switch
- Preset import and export through Files
- MIDI Learn for every knob and the POWER lamp
- Full parameter automation in AUv3 hosts

All audio is processed on your device. No account, no data collection, no internet connection required.

R862 is not affiliated with, and is not endorsed by, RCA or its successors. RCA and the 862 are named only to identify the tube and its published data.