jks

Click rounding: just shift-click
http://kiwisdr.com/quickstart/index.html#id-user-shortcuts

Correct. The WSPR extension ignores the tuned frequency. That's why it has WSPR band menu -- to allow the standard WSPR frequencies to be selected. It never even occurred to me to support non-standard frequencies. Why would I go to that considerable trouble when virtually no one would do that? (aside from maybe the transverter scenario) I don't even know how wsprnet.org would handle an uploaded spot with an odd frequency. Probably just filter it out.

Metal above the base of a E-field probe antenna is not a good idea. Pieter-Tjerk de Boer, PA3FWM, creator of WebSDR, explains why in this excellent article: http://www.pa3fwm.nl/technotes/tn07.html

Short answer: The Kiwi GPS is not as good/sensitive as other commercial GPS devices you may have. You cannot place the antennas of both at an inside window and expect similar results. Why this is so is a complicated story. Before you decide your Kiwi GPS puck antenna is broken it really needs to be tested while outside with a clear, unobstructed view of the sky (and without any cable extensions). Or with a longer length antenna/amplifier/low-loss cable combination that delivers an appropriate signal level to the Kiwi GPS input.

What you observed while unscrewing the SMA connector is likely just the elevation of the noise floor causing spurious sat acquisitions. The Kiwi GPS acquisition threshold is set very low to try and compensate for the low system gain at the expense of more false acquisitions. You are not receiving legitimate sat signals until the numbered "subframe" blocks start turning colors. Whenever the acquisition SNR exceeds 16 an attempt is made to track the signal (real or not). At that point you'll see gain, watchdog, status and RSSI numbers as you mentioned until the watchdog goes off after there have been no valid subframes detected and the channel goes back to being idle.

As to why the Kiwi isn't as good as a commercial GPS I'll save that for another post.

Seeed finally got back to me about the Kiwi production situation. They said they were not able to find ADC chips. I didn't understand this at all as a single click on a bookmark with my mouse showed hundreds of chips in stock at the usual suspects. The only thing I can think of is that Seeed's purchasing department didn't quite understand that Linear Technology had been acquired by Analog Devices back in 2017. And rebranding of the parts may have occurred causing them to think they weren't the same as those called out by the Kiwi Bill-of-Materials. But that's just a guess. Trying to get detailed information out of Seeed is like pulling teeth and seems to be one of the pitfalls of doing business with China.

Anyway, they are supposed to receive 350 parts tomorrow and hopefully production will resume shortly thereafter.

I must mention however that I am extremely grateful for Seeed's involvement with the Kiwi. Their production quality is top notch. And their efforts to develop the distributor network has helped the project tremendously.