Will a Flex 6000 series meet my requirements?

KM6CQ - Dan

I work CW and Digital modes with VAC 90% of the time. The rest is a few hours a week on SSB. The 3000 works perfectly for my operating preferences. It seems that the mode commonly discussed and demoed on the 6000 series is SSB. I realize more ops use SSB so I get that. However, Flex has done such a nice job on the 3000 with CW and being able to use VAC in PSDR. I don't want to give that up. If the 6000 works even better I am interested. But I do not want to downgrade those modes just to have a better radio on SSB. So does the 6000 series meet my requirements now? Or will it in the near future? Thank you all for your input. 73, Dan KM6CQ

Steve-N5AC

Dan, When we designed the radio, one of our goals was the best CW anywhere. You never know whether you are going to achieve this until the software is done and the radio is working as a system. In the last couple of weeks, the team has spent a lot of time working on CW. Toward the end of our work, we had the radio doing 100WPM CW and you could hear between the DITS at that speed provided you used one antenna for receive and another for transmit. If you don't have this setup, you can use the same antenna and we were getting 30-35WPM hearing between the dits. We just released this software to our testing team and I'd be surprised if they don't find any issues so we'll see how it goes, but it's looking very good. We have digital modes through VAC scheduled for release in January and they should work very similarly to what you use on the FLEX-3000 now, but with a higher performance radio. Steve

Asher - K0AU

I've worked 50 countries on CW in 2 1/2 weeks with my 6K. I'm a 20WPM casual DXer so take this with a grain of salt. But no complaints so far.

Ken - NM9P

I heard an alpha tester reporting yesterday that the CW skirts in the upcoming release are 4 times sharper than the current test release of SmartSDR. He also said that one used reported that the 10 Hz filter was working well. 10 Hz? WOW! Brick wall filtering with no ringing! I think that the 6500 is going to be a great CW rig, and will only get better. The wide-view pan-adapter is nothing short of spectacular, and will be get even better when they add the pan-fall and averaging on the display.

Tim - W4TME

Ken, the rumor is actually true. And QSK has been added to CW too. These features will be in the 0.15.x and greater releases.

W4EG

I am mainly a digital operator and recently decided to use CW; as I wait for DAX to be release. WOW! Was I surprised with the capability of my F6.7K. I am copying signals between dits and dats making it very useful when trying to contact those rare DX stations. In other words, you can hear the DX answering or working someone else. It reminds me of my formal career (RM) in the USCG.