jks

Do not despair about Dream/DRM -- Santa's elves have been busy:

Selecting 'DRM' in the mode menu of the DX tag is what's broken (and I've just fixed for today's update).

In some respects the DRM extension has just caused a huge drop in the number of available public Kiwi channels. This is one reason I'm always preaching that we need more public Kiwis made available even though looking at the map it seems we have plenty.

But it is early days yet. I am working on improving the efficiency of the code. In recent tests I am able to run one DRM plus 3 ordinary connections provided they don't do anything harsh like run the WSPR extension.

And there is also hope that eventually two active DRM sessions will be able to run on a stock BBG/B Kiwi.

v1.362 fixes a few memory leaks and crashes and makes some minor user interface improvements.
As with other extensions you can make a bookmark that selects DRM and an existing station in the menu, e.g.

my_kiwi.com:8073/?ext=drm,3965        (brings up RFI on 3965 kHz)

The cached build mechanism is still not working, so this update will take around 35 minutes.

The elves have delivered. In time for Xmax / Boxing Day (depending on your timezone) v1.360/61 contains a DRM Beta test.

This will be a long update as a new compiler is installed and the DRM code takes 10 times longer to compile than the rest of the Kiwi code. The DRM compiled code is cached so future updates won't take as long.

There are many bugs and limitations currently:

• Use of the DRM extension on stock Kiwis using the BeagleBone Green/Black is limited to a single channel. DRM won't start unless there is no other activity. All other activity is excluded while DRM is running. Kiwis using a BeagleBone AI can run 4 DRMs simultaneously (but watch your CPU temperature!)
  
• If you don't want DRM available on your public Kiwi because of the above exclusions then disable it in the admin "extensions" tab. DRM entry, "User enabled?" switch. But consider leaving it enabled as we need geographically dispersed DRM Kiwis for testing.
  
• DRM doesn't currently work on Kiwis configured for 20 kHz channels.
  
• The stations in the India MW menu won't play because Dream xHE_AAC codec development is not finished.
  
• The frequencies in the menus are currently static and DRM frequencies are known to change. We are working on a scheme to dynamically update them.
  
• Exactly why some signals "drop-out", even though they are relatively strong, is an interesting topic. We hope to write about this at some point. It has to do with selective fading and the DRM transmission options selected by the broadcaster (e.g. QAM options, coding rates, protection levels).