KiwiSDR Soon to Accept General Orders
Back in April 2016 the KiwiSDR was successfully funded on Kickstarter. Since then almost all the rewards have been mailed out and the number of worldwide receivers available on sdr.hu has increased. KiwiSDR is an SDR cape (add on) for the BeagleBone Black/Green embedded computer which covers 0 – 30 MHz with 30 MHz bandwidth. It’s main purpose is to be used as a web based remote receiver which can be publicly accessed by many users.
Over on the Kickstarter updates page we see news that Seeed Studio is taking over the production and distribution of the KiwiSDR, and soon you’ll be able to order the KiwiSDR cape directly from their online Bazaar. Seeed studio is the same company that produces several other capes for the BeagleBone and they also produce the BeagleBone Green which is needed to run the KiwiSDR. They write:
We are very pleased to announce an agreement for Seeed Studio to take over production and distribution of the KiwiSDR going forward. What does this mean? Until now Seeed only had a contract with us to produce the Kickstarter rewards and pre-orders. Now Seeed will add the KiwiSDR to their family of BeagleBone capes they manufacture and distribute. Very soon you’ll be able to order the KiwiSDR directly from Seeed’s online Bazaar, pay directly with a credit card or Paypal and use their shipping system.
For us, and you as Kiwi owners, this is a very positive development. It means soon we’ll be able to devote the majority of our time to software development and providing you support. And as you probably know there is a large list of bugs, feature requests, extensions, distributed experiments and educational material we’d like to be working on instead of worrying about shipping and manufacturing issues. Improving the software is the best way to differentiate ourselves in a crowded SDR marketplace.
We would appreciate it if you would continue to purchase from us until our stock is depleted. Seeed has already manufactured a significant number of units alongside our prior build and will be able to meet the demand immediately. We thank everyone at Seeed for their fantastic effort in making KiwiSDR a reality.
I have a 30m loop antenna connected to mine.. So, naturally, 30m is great and most of the other bands are noise.
The device is a bit of a novelty at this point. There are some major enhancements which could really make this thing shine.
And we encourage everyone to let us know what those enhancements might be. The bug & wish list is here: http://kiwisdr.com/bugs/
Can you mention one? because i tried many but i was able to receive only MW stations and some 41 mt band broadcast in one case.
The good ones should be put on top. The voting system is not efficient; there is no downvote.
Is it able to receive good signals with a mini whip like the websdr at Twente?
sorry i wanted to reply to the other post at 6:40AM
Here are some good ones from Europe at 0920Z in the morning:
Italy beta site wire antenna: http://kiwisdr.briata.org:8073/ http://kiwisdr.com/KiwiSDR/good.rx.IT.png
Austria beta site wire antenna: http://www.websdr.at:8073/ http://kiwisdr.com/KiwiSDR/good.rx.AT.png
Netherlands Wellbrook ALA1530 loop: http://henk.homenet.org:8073/ http://kiwisdr.com/KiwiSDR/good.rx.NL.png
Be sure to zoom-in and adjust the “WF min” slider for best waterfall colors.
Using http://sdr.hu/?top=kiwi will show all the KiwiSDRs first in the list. As for other changes to sdr.hu you’ll have to ask the author as we do not control that site.
I am using a PA0RDT-style mini-whip on mine here in New Zealand. It works fine. I hear VLF/LF signals from Europe everyday.
It is much better now. I don’t know why last night at about 11PM CET i was receiving almost nothing even in the low bands. The web interface takes many resources from my slow pc; i use Firefox. The waterfall do not flow fluid and there is big delay in the audio when changing frequency. This should be improved, Websdr is much lighter software but i understand that you have no control on this.
Sorry, I had sent an email earlier with links and pictures of Kiwis with good reception. But there were too many links in that message and it was deleted as spam, lol. Here’s a recent installation in the Netherlands using an ALA1530 loop: http://kiwisdr.com/KiwiSDR/good.rx.NL.png
The audio delay is being worked on. There will always be some delay due to the necessary buffering, but it should be better in sync with the waterfall. Sure, WebSDR is better, but that system is a monster PC with a c.a. USD $1000 GPU card compared to the processing power of our $35 Beagle. Always room for improvement though.
I just unspammed your comment with many links.
I was a $25 donor to that kickstarter; I don’t want to set up a system, but I wanted to encourage the project so I could log in to other systems around the world and check out their local radio activity.
However, for the ones which are set up I’ve found many of them have terrible reception, with large bands containing nothing but noise. I’m not sure if they aren’t configured properly, or have poor antennas or what. I am hoping that things will improve over time.
Yes, antennas and noise reduction will always be a challenge and limiting factor. But there are a fair number on http://sdr.hu/?top=kiwi now that have excellent reception. When we brought up the first prototype the noise was awful and we didn’t know if it was a fatal design flaw or self-interference from the Beagle. It was only after an early beta test unit was setup in the woods 150 km north of Stockholm that we saw how good the noise floor could be.