jks

Well, it works. Sort of. Try the Beta test Kiwi in Kansas:

http://64.136.200.36:8073/?f=1160.00/12000amz9
vs
http://64.136.200.36:8073/?f=1160.00/16000amz9

Remember that you can change the passband width by typing / into the frequency box (e.g. /20000 for 20 kHz). Or using the 'p' and 'P' keys.

There are some problems as expected. I used a SND_RATE of 20250 so that SND_RATE/54 = 375 so the WSPR will still work (it does). There are some audio underruns of course. But I was able to make two regular connections and a WSPR extension connection and it seemed to work okay. The GPS seemed to run fine.

I think it sounds not quite right with a bandwidth greater than about 16 kHz. That might be a problem with the re-sampler that runs in Javascript on the browser. Measurement for passband flatness is obviously needed. There seems to be some high-frequency artifacts with the compression turned off which doesn't quite make sense.

Here's what I do. I have a git clone of the current Kiwi disto on my Mac. I edit there and compile to get the compilation bugs out. The main Makefile detects when you're not compiling on the Kiwi and allows different compile tools/flags to be used that are particular to your development machine.

Then on the target Kiwi I use NFS to mount the Mac sources read-only onto /root/Beagle_SDR_GPS. So I can just ssh into the Kiwi and build/test there without having to be copying all the source files all the time. unix_env/bashrc (that gets installed as /root/.bashrc on the Kiwi) has some hints about setting up NFS on the Kiwi and your development machine (I don't know about Windows though). Because the mount is read-only if the update process is unintentionally started on the Kiwi it won't reverse-write the sources on the Mac and destroy my work-in-progress (super important obviously).

The various Makefiles have manual targets for copying the Verilog source files to whatever environment Xilinx Vivado happens to be running. In my case I run it on Ubuntu on a VirtualBox VM on my Mac. It works surprisingly well despite all the emulation layers (about 10 minutes to build the FPGA image on a three-year-old MacBook Pro).

Chris,

Since the very beginning people have asked for a mode where the Kiwi could act like a traditional SDR, providing a single IQ channel with as wide a bandwidth as possible (so external SDR software could be used etc.) I have resisted doing this because its not really in keeping with goals of the project. You can buy cheaper/better SDRs if this is what you want to do.

But it seems like we're slowly going in that direction. We didn't used to have IQ output, or an external connection API, or even the selectable channel configuration modes that we do now (4snd + 4wf or 8snd + 2wf). So maybe someday we'll end up with a third option of a single channel at whatever bandwidth turns out to be possible.

As to what the single channel bandwidth might be, well, that's a difficult question. There are some bottlenecks due to the simple low-cost design of the Kiwi. It would just have to be tried with increasing bandwidth until there started to be buffering/realtime-response problems. Since you can get 8 channels at 10 kHz each now you would expect a single channel at 80 kHz (minimum) shouldn't be a problem. That's probably correct.

Be careful making changes to /root/.bashrc New Kiwi releases will overwrite that file (and .profile) if there have been changes made in the release (e.g. I have added some new command alias). Put your changes in /root/.bashrc.local The Kiwi will create this file with some defaults if it's never existed before but then leave it alone forever after that.

The git clone seems to be trashed. Assuming there isn't more general filesystem corruption, try setting the clone aside and building from a new one:
Login as root to the /root home directory.
Do a "df" and make sure you have at least 300 MB free on your filesystem.

"cdp; mst; cd" (stop if currently running; go back to root dir)
"mv Beagle_SDR_GPS Beagle_SDR_GPS.bad"
"gclone Beagle_SDR_GPS" (this is an alias for "git clone https://github.com/jks-prv/Beagle_SDR_GPS.git")
"cdp" (cd project)
"mi" (make install)
"ku" (kiwi up)
wait a bit
"ms" (check status)

The git clone seems to be trashed. Assuming there isn't more general filesystem corruption, try setting the clone aside and building from a new one:
Login as root to the /root home directory.
Do a "df" and make sure you have at least 300 MB free on your filesystem.

"cdp; mst; cd" (stop if currently running; go back to root dir)
"mv Beagle_SDR_GPS Beagle_SDR_GPS.bad"
"gclone Beagle_SDR_GPS" (this is an alias for "git clone https://github.com/jks-prv/Beagle_SDR_GPS.git")
"cdp" (cd project)
"mi" (make install)
"ku" (kiwi up)
wait a bit
"ms" (check status)

The git clone seems to be trashed. Assuming there isn't more general filesystem corruption, try setting the clone aside and building from a new one:
Login as root to the /root home directory.
Do a "df" and make sure you have at least 300 MB free on your filesystem.

"cdp; mst; cd" (stop if currently running; go back to root dir)
"mv Beagle_SDR_GPS Beagle_SDR_GPS.bad"
"gclone Beagle_SDR_GPS" (this is an alias for "git clone https://github.com/jks-prv/Beagle_SDR_GPS.git")
"cdp" (cd project)
"mi" (make install)
"ku" (kiwi up)
wait a bit
"ms" (check status)

Fixed. Interesting bug. Misconfigured Kiwis exposing a bug in how the list of TDoA hosts is constructed. Pure coincidence that it is occurring just as v1.246 is released as no changes in this code occurred in the update.

Press 'x' to quickly toggle the visibility of all control panels.

Press 'y' to toggle the top bar and band/tag bars as follows: both visible, one visible, the other visible, none visible. The frequency scale remains always visible.

Mobile-device equivalents of this, and mobile improvements in general, are being thought about.

November 23/24: Massdrop is active again, but currently marked as for only 3 days instead of the usual 7. So don't delay. Maybe as part of the USA "Black Friday" nonsense. $80 discount on the Kiwi kit ($219 vs $299). Free (but slow) shipping to the USA. Best deal out there for sure.