Please help to keep our Kiwi SDR’s online.
With the massive increase in the cost of electricity it is hard to see how we can keep all of the Kiwi SDR’s in service. If a few people donate every month then it is possible to keep this expensive equipment running.
It is as easy as using your PayPal account and sending PayPal donations to:
paypal@kiwisdr.uk
It should be noted that once you have hit the donate button you can pay using your bank card, and you do not need to have a PayPal account.
If you have a PayPal account however, it is very easy to select the ‘friends and family’ option which means that we don’t have to pay any PayPal fees at all, so well worth taking that option.
It is also easy for anyone to send donations via bank transfer, our bank details are:
Bank: NatWest
Name: A Coombs
Account: 81529570
Sort: 60-23-32
You may also send a cheque or cash to our address:
G1VSX
Graham Buck
1 Hobart Road
Weston-super-Mare
North Somerset
BS23 4QQ
With the massive increase in the cost of electricity it is hard to see how we can keep all of the Kiwi SDR’s in service. If a few people donate every month then it is possible to keep this expensive equipment running.
It is as easy as using your PayPal account and sending PayPal donations to:
paypal@kiwisdr.uk
All of our Kiwi SDR’s went back into service on Friday 11 November 2022
Our biggest challenge now is to keep all of our Kiwi SDR’s in service. This is going to be hard work as our electricity bill is more expensive than most peoples home bills and we get no cost of living help!
Please consider donating towards our massive electricity bill so that our SDR’s operate well into the future.
Thanks to so many of you making generous donations we have been able to replace the faulty networking equipment and all of the hard work replacing the faulty equipment has now been done on site
All of the Kiwi SDR’s were put back into service on Friday November 11th 2022.
We had lost the main Internet feed to our Kiwi SDR site, so we needed to purchase a replacement Internet 5GHz link to restore service.
Unfortunately good quality, professional 5GHz links are quite expensive.
The 5GHz dish mounted at the top of our biggest tower is fed via fibre optic cable rather than the usual network cable. This is to minimise the interference created by long runs of network cable, which can be picked up by the Kiwi SDR’s.
While our biggest tower was lowered to remove the faulty dish the long length of fibre optic cable was damaged.
This was expensive to replace.
The biggest challenge recently has been trying to find enough time to work on the SDR site.
This has been particularly difficult since my partner was admitted to hospital and is now very ill, I have been using all of my time looking after the family and house work etc.
It is also difficult to find days when the weather is good for long enough periods to get all of the work done on site.
I am finding that I am having to make multiple journeys to the SDR site, and many times the weather turns bad, so some repair work remains unfinished.
With the high cost of fuel these multiple visits have become very expensive.
The remaining worry is the high cost of the SDR sites electricity bill, which has to be paid for by a very few of us, and it is more expensive than most people pay for their houses.
We don’t receive any cost of living help for a radio site of course, so the costs are now massive.
Any help from our users would be really appreciated.
It is as easy as using your PayPal account and sending PayPal donations to:
paypal@kiwisdr.uk
It should be noted that once you have hit the donate button you can pay using your bank card, and you do not need to have a PayPal account.
If you have a PayPal account however, it is very easy to select the ‘friends and family’ option which means that we don’t have to pay any PayPal fees at all, so well worth taking that option.
With the massive increase in the cost of electricity it is hard to see how we can keep all of the Kiwi SDR’s in service. If a few people donate every month then it is possible to keep this expensive equipment running.
It is as easy as using your PayPal account and sending PayPal donations to:
paypal@kiwisdr.uk
It should be noted that once you have hit the donate button you can pay using your bank card, and you do not need to have a PayPal account.
If you have a PayPal account however, it is very easy to select the ‘friends and family’ option which means that we don’t have to pay any PayPal fees at all, so well worth taking that option.
If you can help, it is as easy as using your PayPal account and sending PayPal donations to:
It is very expensive to keep all of our equipment running, with our monthly electricity bill costing more than people pay for their house!
Our running costs have risen quite dramatically, which is going to make it even harder to keep all of our systems in service, so do please donate if you possibly can.
To get the best out of our Kiwi SDR’s you really need to change your waterfall settings to manual.
This will allow you to see many more weak signals.
You need to make the display as dark as possible, so that the display is not washed out, but not so dark that you can’t see the weaker signals.
The changes which you need to make are found on the right-hand floating box.
First click on the left-hand waterfall button under the big magnifying + symbol. It has WF plus the number of your zoom setting written inside it. For example it may say WF7.
Once you have clicked on this waterfall button, you will be able to make the correct manual waterfall settings, which can be seen in the following picture.
The four drop-down boxes near the bottom of the WF box should be set as follows from left to right:
Kiwi, Man, OFF and EMA.
Now make sure that the box above the bottom-left Kiwi drop-down box says spec with a triangle (delta).
Set its slider all the way to the right until it displays 32 Avgs.
With the slider above this box set to fast, the WF min sider set to 130 and the WF max set to 30 you will be off to a good start.
You will need to adjust the WF min slider quite often to get it just right on all of the bands.
Set it so that the waterfall is not looking washed out. Go for a dark blue look, but not too dark!
Kiwi-SDR-waterfall-settings
Don’t forget to look at the Kiwi extensions using the top right drop-down box.
There are some great features included, such as WSPR decoding and the S-Meter which draws a graph of the signal strength received.
Make sure to set the min and max levels for the graph close to the level of the signal which you are monitoring and it will clearly show you the QSB trend etc.
It is well worth clicking on the spectrum analyser button, which is labelled as spec, and is just under the extensions drop-down menu, and to the right of the three + symbols in circles.
Having a waterfall and a spectrum analyser that lets you look at the entire 32MHz spectrum, or zoom right into a signal to see every detail isn’t something you see on many receivers.
Major technical update:
You can now listen using the 28MHz 5/8th vertical, Wellbrook loop or 160m dipole automatically on every kiwi SDR.
All Kiwi’s on site will route you to the perfect antenna for your frequency automatically.
Individual users per Kiwi can use different antennas simultaneously.
No more coax relays being switched on you!
It is easier than ever to listen to the Weston kiwi’s, as you only need to type:
and your browser will be connected to our SDR’s.
That URL should be very easy to remember and give out over the air.
A massive thank you to you if you feel that you can make a donation and support the kiwi SDR’s too.
All of the Weston Kiwi SDR’s are connected to a 160m dipole, Wellbrook loop & 28MHz 5/8th vertical via an HF multiplexer, then via a 16 port HF multicoupler (low noise pre-amp with very high output level providing 16 outputs).
Please donate if you possibly can so that we can keep all of our SDR’s in service and make our SDR site even better than it was in 2020.
Click on the following links to access the currently available Weston Kiwi’s:
Bank: NatWest
Name: A Coombs
Account: 81529570
Sort: 60-23-32
It is also easy to use your PayPal account to send a PayPal donation to: paypal@kiwisdr.uk
The main advantages of our hill top site for our Kiwi SDR’s is the very quite noise floor, the ability to put up many full size HF dipoles, including top-band aerials and the lack of any nearby transmitters, masts, houses or broadband.
Our repeater site and SDR site is located on Bleadon Hill in Weston-super-Mare. The site is 108m ASL and has clear views towards Minehead, Ilfracombe, Glastonbury, Cardiff, Clevedon and you can clearly see the sugar loaf near Abergavenny in South Wales.
Unfortunately our big top-band dipole is held up by a hilomast, which continuously lets us down.
If you are ever tempted to buy a hilomast, then please think again.
The design is very poor, and the cost of replacement gaskets is incredibly high.
SMC communications, South Midlands Communications has the monopoly on all the spares.
They charge £20 to post a small envelope containing the gaskets!
SMC couldn’t be more awkward or slow in dealing with our order.
Please do not buy a hilomast, as you will be left very disappointed!
Our massive fields have not had any cattle or sheep in them for many years, so all of our outdoor equipment has been very safe and undisturbed, and most importantly there have been no electric fences to destroy our amazingly quiet background noise level.
It gives all of the team a lot of pleasure seeing so many people using the SDR’s, so long may it continue.
It is as easy as using your PayPal account and sending PayPal donations to:
paypal@kiwisdr.uk
It should be noted that once you have hit the donate button you can pay using your bank card, and you do not need to have a PayPal account.
If you have a PayPal account however, it is very easy to select the ‘friends and family’ option which means that we don’t have to pay any PayPal fees at all, so well worth taking that option.
It is also easy for anyone to send donations via bank transfer, our bank details are:
Bank: NatWest
Name: A Coombs
Account: 81529570
Sort: 60-23-32
You may also send a cheque or cash to our address:
G1VSX
Graham Buck
1 Hobart Road
Weston-super-Mare
North Somerset
BS23 4QQ
andy@gb3wb.com
At the top of the page there are a few photos of the KiWi’s and our radio site so that you get a feel of the set-up. The photo that seems to be only of trees is really to show that you can easily see Glastonbury Tor from the repeater site, which is in Weston, so its pretty cool.
You can also see Hinkley point nuclear power station, seen across Bridgwater Bay.
