jks
About
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- jks
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Who you are, where you are and what are your KiWi's ?
Okay, I added a plugin that allows some content to be added to profiles. For now just Location, Callsign and "Additional information". Let me know if you think we should have others. Look at my profile as an example (click "jks" at the top of this post).
The content isn't presented very optimally. It just appears at the top of the user's profile page.
I also re-enabled the "reactions" feature (i.e. adding "helpful", "awesome" to posts like we used to have).
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possible feature : TUNING lock
I agree. It should work like a browser. I'll update the bug list. There was something similar on there before.Also already on the list is the idea of having the classic A/B VFO buttons and a "band memory". So when you hop between bands using the select band menu it goes to the last selected frequency in the band instead of the mid-point, which is what it does now. -
pub0.kiwisdr.com & pub1.kiwisdr.com
These are from a recent attempt to make a "user preferences" function work. They are required by xdLocalStorage. I tried again about 6 months ago with xdLocalStorage. More recent browser security changes mean the scheme had to be changed once again compared to work that was done some years ago. It quickly got complicated, so I had to set the work aside for the moment.
For those that don't know, user preferences would be an extension that allows you, an ordinary Kiwi user (not owner/admin), to do things like: Setting the default cw passband set to 270 Hz and have that apply to every single Kiwi you ever visit from that point onward. Or the same with keyboard shortcut bindings. Or just about any other user interface customization that could be easily added.
That, plus a real mobile user interface, are the two major missing elements of the software (besides adding an extension to decode your favorite modulation waveform).
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v1.456,458,459
Short version: Old behavior restored so external apps, including those using kiwiclient et al, should work as before. But Kiwi web interface uses new changes as described below.
v1.459 May 23, 2021
Waterfall / spectrum:
Fixed the CIC compensation added to the last release.
Added waterfall interpolation URL parameter "wfi=N" e.g. kiwi:8073/?spec&wfi=13
Also available as an API parameter on the waterfall web socket: "SET interp=N"
Value N below. Add 10 to enable the CIC filter compensation.
The value below answers the question: "What to do when multiple FFT values
contribute to a single waterfall/spectrum pixel bin". In most cases the FFT
is larger than the 1024 display pixels of the waterfall (or external application).
0 take max (old and continuing server default for kiwiclient, external apps etc.)
1 take min
2 take last
3 do drop sampling
4 take cumulative moving average of values
...
13 drop sampling + CIC compensation (new Kiwi browser interface default)
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Camp Features
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v1.446/445/444
From the CHANGE_LOG file. Not a lot new here. Except for days of tedious checking for memory errors (buffer overruns) and memory leaks to rule out a possible cause of the Windows 10 audio problems.
v1.446 March 28, 2021
WSPR extension:
By request: Added 6 & 13 MHz ISM bands (UK balloon-mobile operation).
Can restart autorun decoders via an admin page button instead of server restart.
Windows 10 audio "popping" problem:
Looked for memory addressing errors and leaks with the Clang address sanitizer.
A few minor issues fixed but nothing that changes the audio problem.
This was expected, but also had to be ruled out.
v1.445 March 24, 2021
SNR measurement:
Take transverter frequency offset into account.
Display SNR value(s) on user (top bar) and admin pages (status tab).
Added SAM PLL loop control to audio tab.
Has a slow loop setting "DX" that can be used to better track weak stations.
v1.444 March 23, 2021
Include two most recent SNR values in /status query. This implies all the SNR values
for public Kiwis will be aggregated in the rx.kiwisdr.com/index.html file
HTML comments.
TDoA extension:
Improved help panel contents.
Added warning against prematurely using too many sampling stations because of
the large number of computation timeouts we see on the server.
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v1.437 From Marco, IS0KYB: AGC threshold bar, Passband overload mute
From the CHANGE_LOG file:
v1.437 March 6, 2021
From Marco, IS0KYB (thanks Marco!)
AGC threshold bar added to S-meter:
The white bar appearing above the green S-meter bar is the AGC threshold value
(from control panel AGC tab). The threshold dBm value can read on the
S-meter scale in equivalent S-units.
Passband overload mute:
Mutes the audio when the signal level in the passband exceeds a set value.
The value is defined by a new setting on the admin page config tab.
When active a "!" appears in place of the mute icon on main control panel.
Useful for example when a nearby transmitter would otherwise result in a
loud annoying signal. Mute recovery time uses existing squelch tail setting.
Added list of code contributors to _COPYRIGHT file.
Work in progress. If we missed your code contribution please email us.
We have hundreds of github issues and thousands of emails and forum posts to review.
Typing '/' alone into frequency box will restore the passband to the default value
for the current mode. Shortcut to shift-clicking over a mode button.
FFT extension: add help button, URL parameters, preset for RTZ.
Add mouseover popups to more buttons and menus on main control panel.
Removed more references to sdr.hu
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v1.352: new time station extension (timecode decoder)
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Direct access to S Meter and Spectrum data
Well.. There needs to be a more detailed discussion here as there may be some misconceptions about what the KiwiSDR is and what its capabilities are.
The timing repeatability of the measurement you want are a little difficult to achieve given the "best effort" nature of some of the Kiwi functions. This is due to the Kiwi design. Remember that the Kiwi goal is to provide a total solution in a single box, including what is usually the "PC" side of most SDRs that consist of an SDR "IQ-generator" device plus PC with SDR software running on it. And the PC has vastly superior processing power to the Kiwi's single board computer (BeagleBone Green). BUT at the dollar cost of the PC (which most people incorrectly discount) and the often terrible burden of software installation problems (you see this even now in the support forums of the IQ-generator products -- very sad).
So with its design the Kiwi has to give highest priority to processing the audio and guarantee no audio drops (except when the network connection is poor -- something the Kiwi cannot control). Everything else has lower priority, especially waterfall processing. And there are lots of other things going on simultaneously: GPS, user interface, possibly processing to support an open extension etc.
Consider the case of the wsprdaemon group (https://groups.io/g/wsprdaemon/topics). For a long time they asked for custom modification to the Kiwi. And I provided them, best I could. And they bought a number of Kiwi. Fair enough. But in the end their ever-growing requirements forced them to switch to a more traditional IQ-based SDR with a standard PC for the increased processing power.
Some technical points we should discuss. The audio and waterfall output each use two completely independent, tunable, digital downconverters (DDCs). The S-meter values are derived from the audio channel and influenced by the passband. It is not derived from passband-limited waterfall bins. Not many people understand or use this feature but it is entirely possible to tune the waterfall far away from where the audio channel is listening. The audio could be listening to 7020 cw and enter "#28200" in the frequency field to check for 10m beacon activity -- without disturbing the 80m audio (enter "#" to re-align the waterfall to the audio).
Now to your questions:
1. The S-Meter records the sum of the discrete RF spectrum values over the passband.
No. See above. It's just a
2. The passband width depends on the chosen modulation mode, e.g., CW vs CWN vs AMW, etc.
No, the passband is not fixed based on mode. The initial passband values are set based on mode. But you can change them to be whatever you want afterwards. And those new values will persist when you return to that mode (I'm talking about the Kiwi user interface here).
3. The time between the plotted points in the S-Meter display varies. (I manually counted a range of about 42 per second to 47 per second.)
Are you talking about the S-meter extension? (graph at the top of the display when active). You must be. Did you really count display pixels between the vertical marker lines to determine this?
4. Why is the time between plotted points allowed to vary?
I can't remember. That extension was written many years ago. Probably because there was no buffering of the S-meter values. Remember that the S-meter extension runs on a best-effort basis. And also involves a Javascript component that runs in the browser. So yet another source of timing uncertainty. The actual S-meter values are prepended to each audio packet sent from the Kiwi. So occur at a regular rate. But there can be many reasons why they are not processed at a regular rate.
5. The waterfall plot is a more direct way to plot the RF spectrum.
Yes.
6. The bandwidth of the spectral waterfall plot is governed by the chosen size (i.e., the zoom level) of the display window.
Yes. 30 MHz divided by power of two: 15, 7.5 MHz etc. The user control panel "stat" tab shows the spectrum span value.
7. What is the time between successive “lines” of the waterfall plot?
This varies considerably due to the low priority of the waterfall task. And also the "acquisition time" determined on the zoom factor. And there is a "WF Rate" control on the WF tab that sets relative update time as well. Just like a real spectrum analyzer, high zoom factors take considerable time for the DDC to accumulate all the necessary samples. At z0 it happens in a flash. At z14 it takes forever.
8. Is this timing constant?
No. See above.
9. It is possible to use the CURL command to manually sample the S-Meter and spectrum by specifying a time in the former case and a time and a frequency in the latter case.
Yes for the S-meter, no for the waterfall (but it would be relatively easy to add and is maybe the easiest solution to your measurement problem). The various URL-based queries that can also be used via curl are listed here: http://kiwisdr.com/info/#id-urls
10. What would induce you to make it possible to directly access the time series of S-Meter and Waterfall Plot values as, say, CSV files, rather than struggling with recorder and Python?
See #9 answer. I'm more likely to add another query URL to return a sample of waterfall data. Most of the code to do so has already been written for the SNR measurement function since it is based on averaged waterfall bin data.
I'm in the middle of working on new products and upgrades and don't have much time for anything else. I'm having trouble keeping up with my emails as it is..
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Hackers be hacking..
@F5LFE This is really interesting to me because it seems to be an admin connection attack. I'll bet each of those is trying with a different password.
Here's something you can do to verify that. With the admin console type
cdk; touch opt.debug
. And then click the restart button on the admin control tab. This will print more messages in the log when someone connects including the attempted password. See if it changes each time.Look for log entries of the form:
PWD admin admin RESULT: allow=0 pwd_s=<actual admin pwd> pwd_m=<attempted pwd> cant_determine=0 is_local=0 is_local_e=0 [IP address]