I think flex was great. A new 3000 has already been shipped! I found where the problem was coming from. This may help others...
I put another rig into the amp, started the computer, but not the 3000 or psdr. When I transmit, the computer went nuts, all sorts of things came up on the screen, notepad, explorer, timeset, etc! I thought maybe rf was getting in the keyboard and put more ferrites on it and the mouse, winding them through a core a few turns and got a stable system. Then I powered up the 3000 and psdr and left it in receive while I ran the amp. I got an odd buzzing in the flex receiver, disconnecting it from the dummy load fixed that, but ungrounding the computer made it so I could do anything without problems. So my setup likes the computer ungrounded and lots of ferrites. I then put the flex into the amp and tried it on 80 and 40 meters at full power without any problems at all. I have one transistor bad so I cant use it on the air, but can use it as an exciter for my big AM rig. It just provides carrier to that rig. So it seems that the radio can be damaged if the computer goes nuts while you are in transmit. The computer is an E machines el1358-ur20p which has a single core AMD athlon 2 170u cpu at 2 GHz, 2 gig of memory and runs windoze 7 64 bit. I installed a Roswell pcie fire wire card (TI chipset), and the computer is just enough to run the radio. Its far from real time, but it seems to work fine if you do not want to monitor yourself or use break in cw... CPU usage runs from 40 to 60% but it seems stable once you keep the RF out of it. It cost me under $250.00 new at pc richards, or hh gregg, cant remember which one with names like that... It was the cheapest desktop I could find locally, and was intended to replace the computer the wife uses, which came out right after vacuum tubes in computers went away it seems, the new one is a rocket compared to the old one... Brett N2DTS _______________________________________________ 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/
