As I sit here looking at the Flex 3000 ad in QST, I am sure there are a lot of people who recently bought Flex 3Ks who are asking themselves "Didn't Flex Radio Systems think about this before they introduced a radio designed specifically to work with laptop computers? Or, are the comments below that far off target?
Not trying to be snitty, but I am debating whether my next portable rig will be a 3K or a K3. 73 Frank N1UW A very happy Flex Radio customer (5000) ---------- Bob's Opinions (BO) NEVER EVER use a laptop for real time embedded applications like software radio. Just say no irrespective of how much you love the device and its convenience they are simply ill suited to the task. Flex has just spent 3.5 weeks wasting >$100/hour of billable time of its most valuable software engineer EMPLOYEE wasting time on a laptop which could not be made to function so they could have a known reliable laptop for shows. Time that should have been spent on software things, including new architecture architecting. ;-) Laptop's are UTTERLY unpredictable hardware. You will know the processor and that is IT. Unless you pay top dollar and get a "guaranteed the same" laptop, they always take the cheapest motherboard they can get that week. Companies like Dell have a bin for everything when they build the cheap machines, including desktops, and they just grab the part that fits the job and whatever is in the bin goes into the PC. In the case of laptop's, they are ALWAYS trying to shave a buck or two off the cost. Sell a million laptops and that is lots of money. Laptops are about saving power. They are NEVER about high end, how power, low latency computing EVER. The problem you are experiencing is either a firewire driver/firewire firmware/firewire hardware issue and that is just out of the ability of Flex or the developers to control. The software is at the mercy of your firewire vendor. Flex already knows this is its major problem at this time period. If Dudley could ever stop answering the phone long enough (from fixing firewire problems), he has the task of buying a pile of cards and finding what works on what machine with this or that OS. This is for cardbus laptops and PCIe cards for desktops. No one feels your pain more than the developers and official testers. My one comment to you is that it is actually worth the effort. The radio is amazing. Bob N4HY _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List [email protected] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ Message delivered to [email protected]
