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Weston Kiwi SDR Information

All of our Kiwi SDR’s went back into service on Thursday 1st February 2024 after all of the work had been carried out on replacing our big HF dipole and reconfiguring the rest of our aerial system.
This is by far the biggest overhaul of the Weston SDR’s since they were originally put into service all of those years ago.
It was a lot of hard work in the worst weather and it cost a fortune, but the results show that it was worth while.

Just as we got into the new year our big 160m dipole went faulty. For some time it seemed deafer than it used to be, then worked intermittently and finally went completely deaf.

I took the faulty top band dipole down, which is a lot more involved than you would think, as it involves multiple towers and lots of work.

The weather was bad and then just got worse over the following days and weeks with very high winds and freezing conditions.
A one day job turned into weeks of complete nightmares with the wind chill at the top of the hill making the work near impossible.

While our top band dipole was led on the ground tree surgeons turned up and cut down some big trees which were on the boundary to our radio site.
This was not just very sad, but a complete nightmare because the far end of our 160m dipole was held in the air by one of these big trees.

A new solution was found by using a smaller 80m dipole which fits between two of our towers and doesn’t require the use of any trees.

In the mean time one of our domain names stopped working, even though it was paid for and showing a renew date for a years time, it had expired and didn’t work.
This didn’t come to notice straight away, and then it was a struggle to get our hosting service to fix the issue.

All of the Weston Kiwi SDR’s are still connected to an 80m 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).
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 issues with coax relays being switched on you!

It is easier than ever to listen to the Weston kiwi’s, as you only need to type:

80m.live:8073

and your browser will be connected to our SDR’s.
That URL should be very easy to remember and give out over the air.

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.

Any help from our users would be really appreciated.
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.

Listen to the Weston kiwi SDR here


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
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.

Our aerial system allows each Kiwi to listen using the 28MHz 5/8th vertical, Wellbrook loop or 80m 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:

80m.live:8073

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 an 80m 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:

Weston kiwi 8073
Weston kiwi 8074
Weston kiwi 8075
Weston kiwi 8076
Weston kiwi 8077
Weston kiwi 8078
Weston kiwi 8079
G8JNJ kiwi 8060
G3SDH kiwi 8053 using an 80m doublet
G3SDH kiwi 8054 using a Wellbrook Loop
It is easy for anyone to send donations via bank transfer, our bank details are:

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 80m 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.

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