Jupiter heard on a KiWi

After a long period of trying, the planets have aligned, and I have finally managed to see and hear noise bursts from Jupiter on one of my KiWi's.

These typically stretch from about 15MHz to 25MHz, and shouldn't be confused with the much more common noise spikes from lightning, which tends to range from a few MHz upwards.

One of the problems, apart from obtaining a decent low noise floor, is that the KiWi waterfall is slightly too slow to capture these short duration bursts in much detail, which makes it a bit difficult to see them.

I also found that it is better to turn the AGC off, and use a manual gain setting that still provides enough sensitivity with a bit of headroom to spare. I also found that listening with the widest bandwidth I/Q setting allowed me to distinguish between the noise bursts and the Ionospheric sweepers that can be seen fairly clearly in the first screen grab. Instead of making a flat click or crackle sound, which Jupiter does, they produce an audio 'chirp' as they pass thorough the I/Q passband.

For those who are interested and want to see live activity take a look at this live stream on Youtube, complete with a prediction chart.

Make sure you select the live stream option under the waterfall display in the pop up control panel.

Good DXing.

Martin