G4DYA

On second thoughts, I don't think my antenna is going deaf at times. The Kiwi seems to struggle to acquire sats when the server has been running for a few hours. Last night it had 11-12, but by this morning it was down to six. On restarting the server it immediately came back to 11-12. If this is a bug, I suspect it's been there a while.

This is what my shadow map looks like after 18 hours. As expected, there's not much low-elevation stuff in some directions because of trees. In other directions, where the optical horizon is 20+ km away, satellites are being received at elevations as low as 3°. The 'polar hole' is clearly visible.

Just to add to this dormant thread, yesterday I installed a PCTEL GPS-TMG-40N antenna with low-loss feeder and it certainly does the trick. I went for the 40 dB version so there's plenty of signal in hand to feed a 4-way passive splitter when I get one. I'm somewhat screened by tall trees in the south-west quadrant, so don't get many low-elevation signals from there.

The KiwiSDR GPS software only seems to allow a maximum of four Galileo satellites in the 12 channels. Is this intentional? While it all works fine, it would be nice if the limit could be raised - either by allowing more than four Galileo sats, or by allowing more than 12 channels. Also, surely there isn't much point in scanning for QRZZ satellites in Region 1?

Pactor - no FOSS decoder AFAIK, but specification is open: https://www.p4dragon.com/downloads.html (under Documents).

FreeDV - little activity outside activity periods, but there seems to be quite a lot of interest. A UK-based group of FreeDV users has a 5 MHz weekly net and at least one of them uses my Kiwi to check his signal. https://freedv.org/ https://qso.freedv.org/

Digital SSTV - aka HamDRM among other names - I use QSSTV to decode this. It's Qt-based, cross-platform and GPL 3. https://github.com/ON4QZ/QSSTV