jks

So there has been significant port scanning of kiwisdr.com recently. For example, over the last 24 hours 173 thousand scan requests were made by a single ip address from China. Also from a Digital Ocean server farm in the USA.

Some of these scans occur on the proxy ports. If the URL or packet data is particularly pathological it might trigger bugs in the proxy server code (e.g. buffer overruns). This could explain the looping and crash/restart behavior we've seen in the last several days.

Rather than try and debug the proxy code (which we didn't write), and cause significant additional proxy downtime, it was easier to strengthen our existing firewall filtering rules. Port scanning is now more reliably detected and the associated ip addresses banned.

We will closely monitor the situation and see how effective the new rules are.

The proxy service is having serious problems. There is some evidence that it is under attack, but this is not yet confirmed.

No. If the configuration files are ever missing in kiwi.config they are copied from the defaults in the distro. They are never touched after that (unless removed). This is because you can't tell from that point if they have been modified by the admin/owner. So for the vast majority of Kiwis the files in kiwi.config are those copied during the very first startup of v1.2 in the factory. There was a slight format change to the files in a later version but that's a different story.

Thanks. Will fix Makefile in next release to ignore a failed "systemctl {stop,disable} lightdm.service".

From the CHANGE_LOG file:

v1.394  May 31, 2020
    Noise blankers and filters:
        Added the spectral noise reduction filter by Frank, DD4WH and Michael, DL2FW, via the
        Teensy-ConvolutionSDR and UHSDR projects. See: github.com/df8oe/UHSDR/wiki/Noise-reduction
        This noise filter works really, really well. Especially for voice signals.
        A good alternative to the LMS filters.

    Note that the Wild blanker and all the noise filters (wdsp, LMS, spectral) don't currently work
    with the modes: IQ, SAS and DRM (i.e. the 2-channel IQ modes). This will be fixed at some point.

This filter is on the main control panel, audio tab, "noise > filter" menu. Click the "more" button to the right of the menu to adjust the filter parameters, although the filter works well with the defaults. In some cases you might have to increase the filter gain to match the filter-off level, especially during A/B comparisons. Try it with a weak station on the AM broadcast band or ham band SSB signal.

Note that some noise filters always require their sections be enabled via the "more" panel. Otherwise simply selecting their menu entry does nothing. In particular the wdsp and LMS filters since they have independent denoiser and autonotch sections that are enabled separately (or both simultaneously).

From the CHANGE_LOG file:

v1.394  May 31, 2020
    Noise blankers and filters:
        Added the spectral noise reduction filter by Frank, DD4WH and Michael, DL2FW, via the
        Teensy-ConvolutionSDR and UHSDR projects. See: github.com/df8oe/UHSDR/wiki/Noise-reduction
        This noise filter works really, really well. Especially for voice signals.
        A good alternative to the LMS filters.

    Note that the Wild blanker and all the noise filters (wdsp, LMS, spectral) don't currently work
    with the modes: IQ, SAS and DRM (i.e. the 2-channel IQ modes). This will be fixed at some point.

This filter is on the main control panel, audio tab, "noise > filter" menu. Click the "more" button to the right of the menu to adjust the filter parameters, although the filter works well with the defaults. In some cases you might have to increase the filter gain to match the filter-off level, especially during A/B comparisons. Try it with a weak station on the AM broadcast band or ham band SSB signal.

Note that some noise filters always require their sections be enabled via the "more" panel. Otherwise simply selecting their menu entry does nothing. In particular the wdsp and LMS filters since they have independent denoiser and autonotch sections that are enabled separately (or both simultaneously).

From the CHANGE_LOG file:

v1.394  May 31, 2020
    Noise blankers and filters:
        Added the spectral noise reduction filter by Frank, DD4WH and Michael, DL2FW, via the
        Teensy-ConvolutionSDR and UHSDR projects. See: github.com/df8oe/UHSDR/wiki/Noise-reduction
        This noise filter works really, really well. Especially for voice signals.
        A good alternative to the LMS filters.

    Note that the Wild blanker and all the noise filters (wdsp, LMS, spectral) don't currently work
    with the modes: IQ, SAS and DRM (i.e. the 2-channel IQ modes). This will be fixed at some point.

This filter is on the main control panel, audio tab, "noise > filter" menu. Click the "more" button to the right of the menu to adjust the filter parameters, although the filter works well with the defaults. In some cases you might have to increase the filter gain to match the filter-off level, especially during A/B comparisons. Try it with a weak station on the AM broadcast band or ham band SSB signal.

Note that some noise filters always require their sections be enabled via the "more" panel. Otherwise simply selecting their menu entry does nothing. In particular the wdsp and LMS filters since they have independent denoiser and autonotch sections that are enabled separately (or both simultaneously).

From the CHANGE_LOG file:

v1.394  May 31, 2020
    Noise blankers and filters:
        Added the spectral noise reduction filter by Frank, DD4WH and Michael, DL2FW, via the
        Teensy-ConvolutionSDR and UHSDR projects. See: github.com/df8oe/UHSDR/wiki/Noise-reduction
        This noise filter works really, really well. Especially for voice signals.
        A good alternative to the LMS filters.

    Note that the Wild blanker and all the noise filters (wdsp, LMS, spectral) don't currently work
    with the modes: IQ, SAS and DRM (i.e. the 2-channel IQ modes). This will be fixed at some point.

This filter is on the main control panel, audio tab, "noise > filter" menu. Click the "more" button to the right of the menu to adjust the filter parameters, although the filter works well with the defaults. In some cases you might have to increase the filter gain to match the filter-off level, especially during A/B comparisons. Try it with a weak station on the AM broadcast band or ham band SSB signal.

Note that some noise filters always require their sections be enabled via the "more" panel. Otherwise simply selecting their menu entry does nothing. In particular the wdsp and LMS filters since they have independent denoiser and autonotch sections that are enabled separately (or both simultaneously).

From the CHANGE_LOG file:

v1.392,393  May 28, 2020
    Noise blankers and filters:
        Added the Michael Wild noise blanker. Not a lot of operating experience with this yet.
            It seems not to work on some noise sources compared to the standard blanker.
            A good test source is 100 kHz Loran-C in AM mode using a UK Kiwi.
            Increase the gate time (standard blanker) or impulse samples (Wild blanker) to
            account for the longer Loran-C pulses compared to the usual impulse noise.

        Fixed wdsp filter: the control sliders had no effect previously!
            Now it works quite well. You have to adjust the gain carefully to prevent overload.

        Added test pulse gain and pulse width controls. And also whether the pulse is
            applied before or after the passband filtering. The Wild blanker seems only
            effective on post-filter pulses. Probably because the filter is turning the
            pre-filter step function pulses into nicer band-limited pulses.

As of today 10 of the $299 kit version are available directly from Seeed: https://www.seeedstudio.com/KiwiSDR-Kit-p-2725.html