There has been a lot of hoopla about CW on the Flex radios. Frankly, they didn't work very well on CW for many people. This made me very interested in how the new version would work given how much emphasis has been put on CW lately.
I have both a Flex 5000a (RX2 and ATU, no VU5K) and a Flex 1500 at home. (The Flex 3000 is at the school where the kids use it.) I used the regular computer, a home-built AMD machine using parts recommended by Neal, for the 5000 and a MacBook Pro (an older one, about 3 years old now) for the 1500. So far I have been pleased with the performance of all the other features of 2.0.19 but hadn't tried CW. I am not a CW op so I don't use the mode but I can certainly tell when something isn't working. Anyway, I thought I would try it out. Basically I plugged my bencher paddles and dummy load into one radio or the other and started sending. I didn't touch anything in the setup. (I run 96kHz sampling with driver buffer set to 1024 on the 5000. I run 48kHz sampling on the 1500 with driver buffers set at 512.) First impressions: I am impressed as heck. Both the 5000 and 1500 sent at 25 WPM right off the bat. No muss, no fuss, no tweaks, no nothing. Just start sending. I did play with the break-in value. I cranked it down to 50ms and it was working with break-in between elements. I could clearly hear the RX between dits. Even though it was working at full QSK I did find the TR relay chatter annoying so I played with the break in value to get it to keep the TR relay closed between elements but to open between letters and words. It just worked. I did keep cranking the speed up hoping to detect where it started to lose the first dit. I was beyond my ability to make characters when I gave up. As far as I could hear, there was no problem with truncated first elements, either dits or dahs. So as far as I can tell, 2.0.19 is working 100% for all modes. If you have a Flex radio I would say it is time to upgrade to the latest version of PowerSDR. I will be happy to answer questions about my setup. -- Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN/J79BPL 3191 Western Dr. Cameron Park, CA 95682 br...@lloyd.com +1.767.617.1365 (Dominica) +1.931.492.6776 (USA) (+1.931.4.WB6RQN) _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz 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.flexradio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flexradio.com/
