jks

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.

There seems to be a couple of issues here. Take a look at the 0 - 250 kHz band segment below. There is a terrible -60 dBm (S9+10) switcher starting at about 37 or 38 kHz. And it is very wide at the fundamental which will make the harmonics even wider. There is also this funny frequency-switching (square wave looking) signal at 67 kHz.



Now look at this 17 - 19 MHz segment. Harmonics of the square wave looking thing are clearly there as well as what sound like harmonics of the 38 kHz switcher (particularly above 18 MHz). Now you might ask why are there no harmonics of these things in the 1 - 15 MHz range (or why they are so much more heavily attenuated). But I have seen this behavior before where there seems to be selective attenuation of the harmonics. It is extremely interesting that two sources of LF RFI seem to have the same attenuation pattern.



Does it happen at all hours of the day? I'm wondering if a street light (electronic or otherwise) has gone bad. Does the signal strength change (or even null) if you rotate the loop?

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.

I can reproduce this error by putting invalid input in some of the configuration fields, e.g. making the "photo maximum height" field blank rather than a number on the admin webpage tab (it's set to 350 by default). So look at all the field values carefully.

You can also cause the default kiwi.config file to be reinstalled by doing:

cdp
mst        // stops server
cdk
mv kiwi.config kiwi.config.save
cdp
mi         // make install       
ku         // restart

That's the sound the computer program makes to try and wake up the late-night board op who's fallen asleep and let the programming run out..

Type the '@' keyboard shortcut, or click the new entry in the right-click menu to bring up a DX label filter panel. This is an experiment, not perfect and subject to change.

"Ident" means the text shown in the label. "Notes" is the text in the popup when you mouse-over the label. When you enter text in the Ident or Notes field, followed by the Enter key, the labels shown will be filtered. The label Ident and Note must contain the text in the field (not exactly match it). If both Ident and Notes are specified then they both must be true (i.e. "and" not "or"). There is a checkbox to enable upper/lowercase sensitivity.

When filtered the background where the labels appear changes from white to pink to remind you that filtering is occurring. Filtering persists after the filter panel is closed (with the Escape key or clicking the circled-X) until the text fields are set empty.

Note that even when filtered label anti-cluttering is still in effect. Anti-cluttering prevents showing too many labels that would appear too close to each other on the display. So even when filtered you may not be seeing all labels that match unless you zoom in to allow the labels to become uncluttered. You can also avoid this problem by choosing filter text that is more specific (if possible).

For Kiwi admins: Remember that you can edit the label characteristics by holding the shift-clicking on a label. And alt/option-shift-click on a label toggles the Type between "active" and "watch-list". Obviously you can tailor the Ident and Notes contents of your labels to make filtering easier, e.g. adding "DRM" to existing labels that are known to have DRM transmissions so you can simply type "drm" in the Ident filter field.

----

Advanced features

The "grep" checkbox allows the text fields to become "generalized regular expressions" for doing pattern matching. If you don't know what this is see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression So an Ident of "1.*2" would a label matching "1" followed by zero or more characters (the grep meaning of ".*"), then "2". If you enter an illegal regular expression the field will turn red until you fix it.

Type the '@' keyboard shortcut, or click the new entry in the right-click menu to bring up a DX label filter panel. This is an experiment, not perfect and subject to change.

"Ident" means the text shown in the label. "Notes" is the text in the popup when you mouse-over the label. When you enter text in the Ident or Notes field, followed by the Enter key, the labels shown will be filtered. The label Ident and Note must contain the text in the field (not exactly match it). If both Ident and Notes are specified then they both must be true (i.e. "and" not "or"). There is a checkbox to enable upper/lowercase sensitivity.

When filtered the background where the labels appear changes from white to pink to remind you that filtering is occurring. Filtering persists after the filter panel is closed (with the Escape key or clicking the circled-X) until the text fields are set empty.

Note that even when filtered label anti-cluttering is still in effect. Anti-cluttering prevents showing too many labels that would appear too close to each other on the display. So even when filtered you may not be seeing all labels that match unless you zoom in to allow the labels to become uncluttered. You can also avoid this problem by choosing filter text that is more specific (if possible).

For Kiwi admins: Remember that you can edit the label characteristics by holding the shift-clicking on a label. And alt/option-shift-click on a label toggles the Type between "active" and "watch-list". Obviously you can tailor the Ident and Notes contents of your labels to make filtering easier, e.g. adding "DRM" to existing labels that are known to have DRM transmissions so you can simply type "drm" in the Ident filter field.

----

Advanced features

The "grep" checkbox allows the text fields to become "generalized regular expressions" for doing pattern matching. If you don't know what this is see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression So an Ident of "1.*2" would a label matching "1" followed by zero or more characters (the grep meaning of ".*"), then "2". If you enter an illegal regular expression the field will turn red until you fix it.

A single kiwirecorder command can make connections to multiple Kiwis and record to multiple files simultaneously. This is how it is used for example during the TDoA process. So various parameters like -f and -g can have multiple values that will correspond to multiple Kiwis, e.g.

kiwirecorder.py -s kiwi1,kiwi2 -f 1234,5678

connects to kiwi1 recording on 1234 kHz and kiwi2 on 5678 kHz. But

kiwirecorder.py -s kiwi1,kiwi2 -f 7890

Will record 7890 kHz on both.

There are example uses of kiwirecorder in the file kiwiclient/Makefile.

I had to fix a bug in v1.267. So there is now a v1.268 and I added the time limit exemption password to the list of URL parameters. Use "pwd=..." or "password=..."

Feb 20 has come and gone and I have an email into Seeed asking about the production status (email unanswered so far).

But some indirect news. Mouser has been out of stock for some time. But as of this morning now shows 10 units available. And you can successfully add them to your shopping cart. So I have to believe they exist (Mouser is good about not showing stock unless it's actually orderable). I'm hoping this means there was a Kiwi production run and they are being delivered with distributors getting priority. The Seeed website still shows "no stock" however.

I've added a link on the kiwisdr.com page to Octopart, the distributor search engine.