I know, it has been awhile.

I know it has been awhile since my last blog entry. There really hasn't been much to blog about. Most of the BITE functionality has been put into the FLEX-1500, but there are still a few test that need tweaking. The input mixer functionality was added and that was about the biggest change recently.

One thing I have been doing is interfacing a Rubidium (Rb) disciplined10 MHz clock source to the FLEX-1500. I am using a LPRO-101 that I got from WB6RQN and I have been putting that together in a nice enclosure with a 1x4 10 MHz distribution amplifier so I can drive the FLEX-5000 and FLEX-1500 from the same clock source. There were a few software changes needed to be able to transmit and receive using the external clock source with the FLEX-1500, but it is working fine now.

The main work being done at this time is optimizing the audio subsystem for response and quality. There have been a few things uncovered using the Window's HID driver so the developers are digging into it. More on this when there is something to report.

Oh yeah. One thing I did forget to say. I established a new FLEX-1500 distance record a few days ago. On April 21, I had a nice "rag chew" PSK31 QSO on 14.070481 MHz with Harald, DL2OCE in JO41XW on the FLEX-1500. This was a distance of 4300 miles. Antenna was a 20m dipole @ 45' and the power out was about 3.5 watts as reported by the wavenode. I received a nice 579 signal report and an IMD report of -28 dB.

Propagation was good that morning and what was most important was the IMD numbers, indicating that the transmitter was operating very cleanly. This is going to be a cool little radio.