Some of you know I bought a Flex 6300 rig around the first of August. Since
then, I've been working on accessible software for it, using my JJRadio
program. I now can say I have the Flex working pretty well with JJRadio.
I implement the pan adapter differently than I did the scanning pan adapters
for the Kenwood rigs. The pan adapter is an integral part of the Flex
radios, and I have it working quite well with my 40 character braille
display. It's great to be able to go to a band and use the pan adapter to
find signals or clear spots. I update the pan adapter display every two
seconds, which seems good enough. While not as good as a visual pan adapter
and waterfall display, it does work well with a braille display. I show the
signal strength at the corresponding frequency by the number of dots in the
corresponding cell. You can have the pan as wide as you want, and I
interpolate to get a frequency close to the signal that exists. If, for
example, I listen on the broadcast band, I can set the pan left side, or low
frequency to 540, and the high one to 940, 540 + 400 kHz, and you can see
the relative signal strengths for the stations between those points, and
jump to the station by pressing the corresponding routing key on the braille
display. Jaws generates a mouse click at that point when you do that.
The Flex has really sharp filtering, and the selectivity to it is unmatched
by any other rig I've had. Also, on CW, you can set the low and high cutoff
frequencies, just like you can with the Kenwood rigs on SSB.
The 6300 has two slices, and that's all I support at this point. I treat
each slice pretty much just as if they're VFOs A and B. However, you can
listen to both at once, and that's really handy for split DXing.
I have more to do with it. I don't have any of the equalization facilities
programmed in yet, nor the FM repeater stuff such as CTCSS. However, I do
have enough that the rig is useful and fun to use. Also, I have not put
this latest version out on my web site, as I'm not comfortable releasing it
yet, and want to put more into it before I do. However, if anyone out there
has a Flex 6000 series radio, and would like to try it, I'd be happy to send
you a copy to see how it works for you.
--
Jim Shaffer, KE5AL
Pflugerville, TX
www.jjshaffer.net
www.pgramblers.com
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