Good Job Chuck
How did I miss you?
I was cw S&P
And yeah, I thought I had my buffers set wrong on my Flex as there were
some rough/raw notes.
But that may have been conditions as here in the black hole, signals had
rapid up/down strength. Especially Sunday.
Next contest....for sure!
On 12/12/11 12:35 PM, [email protected] wrote:
All,
I thought I would share my experience this weekend in the ARRL 10m contest
using a Flex-5000. This is my first semi-serious contest effort using the
Flex-5K. I operated in the Single-Op CW HP category using the Flex-5000,
PowerSDR v2.2.3 and the N1MM logger. Keying the 5K was done through the CAT
port via N1MM and directly with a paddle connected to the back of the radio (no
external keyer). The Flex-5K was driving a Henry 4K-Ultra (8877) at 50w to make
1.5KW. This was a part time effort in between putting up Christmas lights and
decorations, all-in-all 17 hours of operating time.
So, the question is - Is the Flex5K + PowerSDR ready for prime time CW
contesting? Here are some interesting stats from my effort:
Total Q's = 1129
Mults = 143
Est. Score = 645,788
Best sustained rate over a period greater than 60 minutes 145Qs/hour or 2.4 Qs
per minute .
Best burst rate over 10 minute period 240 Qs/hour or 4 Qs per minute.
You can't do these rates if there are serious issues with the delays in the
system! I had the audio sampling rate set to 48K with a buffer of 512. The DSP
buffers were set to 256 on TX and 2048 on RX. There were a few times when the
TX/RX change over caused my to miss the first part of the first character, but
this was rare.
The brick-wall filter skirts definitely earned their keep. Also, being able to
grab the mouse and fine tune the filter bandpass, both edges and centering,
helped a great deal.
One thing you notice with a Flex-5K is just how many really crappy signals are
on the band. I won't list calls (I did keep notes), but there were a few
standouts in the worst signal on the band category where their clicks were only
10db down from the peak and filling 50+ Kcs. Others were barely recognizable as
a CW signal on the spectrum display.
One recurring issue I still have to figure out is that there was some key
stroke my clumsy fingers made that turned on the multi-RX features. This caused
me to think that someone QSY'd on top of my run frequency when they hadn't. I
finally was clued in by looking at the spectrum display and saw it wasn't
correlated with what I was hearing. Then I saw the multi-rx button highlighted.
This was the only somewhat annoying thing experienced with the Flex all
weekend, and it is attributable to op error.
I consider myself a fair CW operator and I can certainly say from my point of
view the Flex5K+PowerSDR are certainly ready for prime time CW contesting.
I love this radio!!
All the best for the holidays.
Cheers,
Chuck de NJ6D (aka N7KU in the contest)
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--
"Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men."- Kin Hubbard.
---------------------------
Bill H. in Chicagoland
Doing my best to annoy nearly everyone since 1945.
webcams at http://w9ol-towercam.webhop.org:8080
weather at http://hhweather.webhop.org:8080
_______________________________________________
Flexedge mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexedge_flex-radio.biz
This is the FlexRadio Systems e-mail Reflector called FlexEdge. It is used for
posting topics related to SDR software development and experimentalist who are
using beta versions of the software.
