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Second KiwiSDR and antenna splitting
I recently repaired a dipole antenna used at my KX4AZ/T locationin Michigan, and the restored spotting performance motivated me to purchase a second KiwiSDR, in order to get full WSPR band coverage. Last year when I was first trying to share the Kiwi antenna with an RTL-SDR dongle I quickly learned that a simple y-splitter led to lot of intermodulation artifacts from strong broadcast signals, and a mini circuits splitter helped greatly to isolate the two SDRs. Now wondering if a simple y-splitter between two Kiwis would also create problems like that, or whether I will have to put in a proper mini circuits splitter to make everything happy. So just curious if anyone has tried sharing an antenna between two Kiwis with a simple Y-connector, and whether than led to problems other than the obvious signal strength decline one would expect.
WA2TP - Tom
Hi Bruce,
I had done the same with a passive mini circuits splitter and worked fine.
In doing some testing with Rob for wd3.0, I set up a pi4 and dedicated 14rx kiwi,
But I replaced the passive splitter with and active splitter from Elad.
This provided low noise compensation for the loss in the splitter. It yielded very good results.
On Jun 24, 2022, at 9:08 AM, Bruce KX4AZ <bruce@...> wrote:
I recently repaired a dipole antenna used at my KX4AZ/T locationin Michigan, and the restored spotting performance motivated me to purchase a second KiwiSDR, in order to get full WSPR band coverage. Last year when I was first trying to share the Kiwi antenna with an RTL-SDR dongle I quickly learned that a simple y-splitter led to lot of intermodulation artifacts from strong broadcast signals, and a mini circuits splitter helped greatly to isolate the two SDRs. Now wondering if a simple y-splitter between two Kiwis would also create problems like that, or whether I will have to put in a proper mini circuits splitter to make everything happy. So just curious if anyone has tried sharing an antenna between two Kiwis with a simple Y-connector, and whether than led to problems other than the obvious signal strength decline one would expect.
Jim Lill
If you have big signals from something like nearby AM TX, those
Mini-Circuit 2-ways get whacked.
On 6/24/22 09:14, WA2TP - Tom wrote:
Hi Bruce,
I had done the same with a passive mini circuits splitter and worked fine.
In doing some testing with Rob for wd3.0, I set up a pi4 and dedicated 14rx kiwi,But I replaced the passive splitter with and active splitter from Elad.This provided low noise compensation for the loss in the splitter. It yielded very good results.
On Jun 24, 2022, at 9:08 AM, Bruce KX4AZ <bruce@...> wrote:
I recently repaired a dipole antenna used at my KX4AZ/T locationin Michigan, and the restored spotting performance motivated me to purchase a second KiwiSDR, in order to get full WSPR band coverage. Last year when I was first trying to share the Kiwi antenna with an RTL-SDR dongle I quickly learned that a simple y-splitter led to lot of intermodulation artifacts from strong broadcast signals, and a mini circuits splitter helped greatly to isolate the two SDRs. Now wondering if a simple y-splitter between two Kiwis would also create problems like that, or whether I will have to put in a proper mini circuits splitter to make everything happy. So just curious if anyone has tried sharing an antenna between two Kiwis with a simple Y-connector, and whether than led to problems other than the obvious signal strength decline one would expect.