getting to know Kiwi

While everything was hooked up, I took the opportunity to get to know the Kiwi-OSD video time inserter (VTI) device a bit better. Learned that the yellow button pressed once does a time verification integrity process (which one should do at the end of an occultation) and pressed a second time resets the unit.

When I boot the Kiwi, the following messages show, one at a time:

KIWI OSD V3 FIX WAIT
RS232 OR 1PPS ABSENT
90 60.0000 180 60.0000
1 03 3.6 143.2 M -35.4
UTC DATA dd mm yyyy
KIWI OSD V3 FIX WAIT n
hh:mm:ss eee ooo fffff

The third line is the latitude and longitude, of course.

The fourth line is unclear to me. It looks like it contains elevation or altitude. An article from the Kiwi-OSD Yahoo!Groups and a random web page described it in some more detail...

• first number is the Fix Status (anything but zero is good)
• second number is satellites in the fix (higher the better)
• third part is Horizontal Dilution of Precision (which tells relative size of "sigma" circle, smaller the better, anything above 2.0 is suspicious)
• height of GPS sensor
• geoidal separation (if GPS has inbuilt table of values—what ever!)
  

The final digit in the fifth line looks like the number of GPS satellites in the connection. I've seen mine climb to 9 (during this indoor testing).

The time stamp line shows the UTC time, of course. It also shows the even field Vsync offset, odd field Vsync offset, and continuous field count since GPS sync.

It also looks like if I simply remove the power from the Kiwi-OSD that no time information will be inserted into the video. That will be handy if I'm showing or recording something and I don't need time data.