Monday, September 30, 2013

V1 is out!

Flex Radio put V1 of the Flex 6x00 SmartSDR and firmware up today, so the radio is now available for purchase to non-preview customers and fully supported in its intended initial form.

I have a new date at the weekend to drop the radio around to Adam's place again for some new testing.
It's open season to see just how the 6700 will fare - and this time we'll be publishing the results.

I'm sure the guys at Flex will be trying do get some much needed post-push rest, although the business of commercially supplying and supporting the radio has just started in earnest!

I still haven't heard from Flex Radio regarding the SDK/API.  That's probably because they've been completely swamped in getting V1 out... but I really hope to hear something soon about this!




Friday, September 27, 2013

v0.16.4 lookin' good

0.16.4 was released this week and seems to demonstrate that Flex are nicely closing on their goal of a solid V1 in a few days.

Aside from simple UI bugs, there were clearly a few important issues with the prior builds.  One of the most obvious for me had been the ineffectiveness of the noise DSP features.  With 0.16.4 these seem to be functioning as I'd expect in terms of actually having the expected effect.

The radio is a pleasure to use and really seems to pull signals off the air.  Once V1 has dropped, I shall attempt to perform an A-B comparison with the IC-7800.  That will also be the time for another test session with Adam Farson.

SmartSDR is very easy to use, if still a little vanilla in terms of features and convenience options.  For instance, the obvious dragging of a receiver slice to tune it has no snapping feature.  So you typically have to drag then twiddle the scroll wheel on the mouse a little (which does have a snap) to get the 'whole number' frequency that the transmitting station is invariably using.

Of course, we're not getting a number of fairly 'basic' radio features until January, with a completion of the originally specified feature set delivered through the balance of 2014 - but Flex appear to be doing the Right Thing - consolidating the core functionality to an acceptably high quality before building out new features.