Powernumpty

Looking at how close some tiny SM components are to the fixing locations some small physical revisions wouldn't hurt too.

I stuck my old laptop heatsink down and fired it up without a fan, it took a long time to do anything but gradually headed up to about 51C before I went back down to the room it is in (open no case right now) and put a 12V fan at 8V over it, back to the PC and I thought I'd messed up as it was still showing 47C.
It takes an age to change with that much copper on it, small improvements take about five minutes to fully reflect.
Should be good once I actually duct a fan for it.

Glad to hear the Odroid is working so well, I think I take advantage of that one most days.

--later--

Stuck it back in the 2U rack case, case fan only but now blowing in the same direction as the fins (distance about 2" 50mm, no ducting).
Clocked it up to 1.5GHz (don't intend to leave it there) 14 wsprdaemon channels running and it levelled out at 43/44C. the room is probably 4C colder than the 1GHz run with supplied heatsink.

Hi Martin,
That sounds better, assuming the tags are all tidy, for some reason I make hard work of editing them quickly (must try harder, wonder if there is a good video on youtube..).
It was mainly for channelised frequencies and was thinking in fairly narrow terms (image bodged at lunch).
But now you say it going up down the tags seems an interesting feature that could have more uses if we could filter or swap out the current tag list.

What hit me was how hard it currently is to step one channel of our crazy off-set UK frequencies like 27601.25 to 27611.25.
Obviously there is little happening round here on the CB but I have fond memories of the band.

I dabbled with controlling the Kiwi by Midi controls from a phone (TouchOSC) some bits were easy but I gave up at entering frequencies.

Cheers
Stu

On the Alibaba links -
When I say "No" I mean you may pick up some signals but very few.

1. No (mainly higher end of HF, not much use)
2. No (mainly for HF single band use, low efficiency)
3. Yes that work but will be HUGE so no good for your location
4. Just about work - but only if you could get it outside on a mount clamped to a balcony

As modern apartments are full of electrical noise it pays to get an antenna outside, or has "Nulls" for pointing at noise sources to reduce the affect, or antennas that can be tuned to the frequency you want.

I'd say a wideband magnetic loop as Bjarne suggests is your best hope of reception.

One other option you could try (if you can put something outside) is a short fibreglass/bamboo/wood pole holding a long piece of wire dangling out of the window (pole to keep it off the wall).
If you do use the green connector on the Kiwi the ground side also needs connecting to something as a "ground" - try different things like plumbing, something metal but decent size.

With HF the antennas need to be long, using a bluetooth/wifi/vhf antenna on a HF radio is like trying to write with a pen that is half a milimetre long.

Now that is after sales service.

I stuck a whip up becasue I thought the Mag Loop noise level was a little better than I remembered, turns out the loop is still covering an horendous level of switchmode noise that I just can't handle with the whips.
I tried double copper shielded coax, Cat5 with baluns (worked before but this run is longer), lots of ferrite and earthing but everything I did pushed the noise around, reduced in parts but nothing made it useable.

I've got a portable spot I want to try a whip but in my short garden or close to other kit just waste of time and effort (for me).

On the power supply why not try one of the DC-DC step-down's mentioned on the forum, linear on the input side, surprisingly good.
That said here the general switch mode junk is so bad with a whip and and Kiwi on linear supplies it still picks up every switcher to the next county.
I'll stick a second kiwi online to compare "Loop to Whip" if anyone wants to see a real-time comparison.