jks

Believe it or not, this was probably a power supply problem. We've seen over the years that writing SD cards requires a substantial amount of extra peak current. So a power supply that operates a Beagle + Kiwi board normally may not also be able to power an SD write operation on top of that.

This explains why running a Beagle + SD write alone (without the Kiwi board) worked. The current saved from not having the Kiwi board was enough to handle the SD write peak currents.

I have updated the operating guide instructions to mention this issue.

Please make sure your Kiwi is adequately grounded. So the antenna input protection circuitry has a path to drain any charge it is intercepting. Ideally this would be on the antenna coax near the RF in SMA connector. Or from the Kiwi metal case.

The ground connection from a switch mode power supply is likely not earth grounded and the Ethernet cable is transformer coupled with capacitive bypass.

http://www.kiwisdr.com/ks/troubleshooting.pdf

Seeed has been forced to raise Kiwi prices on their website by 15% due to the ongoing semiconductor supply issues.

But there are still plenty of units at old the old prices from distributors. So do some shopping around. Remember that Mouser offers free international shipping to many locations for orders over $50. And be careful to consider shipping, tariff/import, VAT/GST and other costs which these days is a large fraction of the device cost (and the latest sign of our failure as a society/species -- but I digress).

From the new OpenWebRX fork developer I think: https://rx-tx.info

Hi Kevin. When the BBG is running alone, and Ethernet cable hooked up, do you get green and yellow LEDs lit on the Ethernet RJ45 jack? What are the 4 blue status LEDs on the BBG doing?

On the Kiwi board by itself, can you measure the resistance of the round jack power center pin to ground? Except for an inline choke and 4 caps the power trace goes straight to two pins on the P9 header which feeds the BBG. So when not connected to the BBG it should measure open, more or less. Schematic: http://kiwisdr.com/docs/KiwiSDR/kiwi.schematic.pdf

Changing the external SMPS is fine. But there is another issue that is more difficult to deal with. The use of internal DC-to-DC converters (that are also SMPS) directly on the PCB of the device.

These days it seems a lot more devices, including PC motherboards, are powered with higher voltage from the primary supply. Then high-efficiency "point of load" DC-to-DC converters are used right at the consuming load. In the case of your router the external SMPS is now 12V instead of 5V and there is almost certainly a 12V-to-3.3V (or even less) converter internally (chips don't run on 5V these days and in many cases don't run on 3.3V either except maybe for I/O).

mu is an alias for make users And doing make -n users reveals that it does a:

zcat /var/log/user.log.4.gz > /tmp/kiwi.log;
zcat /var/log/user.log.3.gz >> /tmp/kiwi.log;
zcat /var/log/user.log.2.gz >> /tmp/kiwi.log;
cat /var/log/user.log.1 >> /tmp/kiwi.log;
cat /var/log/user.log >> /tmp/kiwi.log;
cat /tmp/kiwi.log | grep -i leaving | grep -vi kf6vo | grep -vi 192.168.1
rm -f /tmp/kiwi.log

So /var/log/user.* are the log files you'd want to search and copy information from. As usual with Unix there are a dozen different ways of doing this sort of thing depending on the result you want.

Okay, after way too much effort I think attachment links are working again. There were 584 such attachments in the database and I have been spot checking the comments containing them. If you notice anything amiss please let me know.

Both issues, "cable brownout" and lab-grade power supply voltage drop due to current limiting, have happened to me personally and were totally unexpected at the time. That's why they are documented: http://kiwisdr.com/quickstart/index.html#id-power