Tony1951

Part of the problem is that unless you live in a remote place you probably have all kinds of RF filth coming from your neighbour's houses too.

As a real linux BEGINNER, I'm delighted to say that I used this thread and another one on here to get my new KIWISDR up and running on an ancient usb wireless dongle. Mine has the Realtek chipset RTL 8188SU but the kiwi somehow used the rtl8712u driver itself - I mean that I didn't tell it to but it recognised it itself.

The other post I referred to by Matti65, is in the thread here: http://forum.kiwisdr.com/discussion/1653/connecting-kiwi-via-wifi) It gave a nice summary of jobs to do before the wifi will work. These are the commands:


ssh into the kiwi and do these jobs:

sudo apt-get install usbutils
sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek
sudo apt-get install iw
sudo apt-get install wireless-tools
sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
sudo apt-get install wavemon

Once done, I just had to edit the network interfaces config file with the command:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

I added the following lines to what was already there in interfaces, as advised in the referenced thread by Matti65, but I changed the "wlan1" that Matti advised, to "wlan0". Here are the lines I added:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "SSID of MY router"
wpa-psk "My router password"

The quotation marks shown in the two lines above are not used. Just enter the commands, wpa-ssid, and wpa-psk, with your own network's ssid and password, minus the quotes.


The wlan0 reference caught me out for a minute, because the instruction I first had referred to wlan1 which is what I first tried and that didn't work because my system had assigned wlan0 to the dongle. I edited that and it came right up after a reboot.


WELL pleased with this because my situation required that I use an old lynksys router installed with dd-wrt, set up in wireless bridge mode to connect the kiwi to the adsl/wifi router which is in another part of the house, and I thought the proximity of a router and dubious wall wart power supply next to the kiwi could introduce spurious noise, especially the wall wart, which, if it existed, I have now got rid of by using the usb dongle. Every cheap switching wall wart you can put in a drawer away from the electricity socket, has got to make less noise in your antenna.

Thanks to the people who trod this path before me and left a readable trail to the solution.

Great to see such excellent customer service John. Delighted with the product here. Had a go at making a better antenna and dropped the noise pick up dramatically. The thing performs really well, but I will try to get a lower noise floor by experimenting.

Great to see such excellent customer service John. Delighted with the product here. Had a go at making a better antenna and dropped the noise pick up dramatically. The thing performs really well, but I will try to get a lower noise floor by experimenting.