Flex 6300. Does it have hardware RX band filters?

Steven Hess

Does the Flex 6300 have hardware band filters in the Amateur bands? 

How does it perform in high RX noise environments.

Considering upgrading from Flex-3000

Tim - W4TME

Steven - No. the FLEX-6300 does not have bandpass (preselector) filters for the ham bands.

In most use cases, this is not an issue.  It only really comes into play when you are in a high aggregate signal environment, where you need the preselctor to reduce the outside of the band of interest signal levels to prevent the overload of the SCU (the ADC).  Like a multi-multi contest environment with lots of near by transmitters.

In regards to noise, the really depends on the type of noise the radio is receiving.  In a lot of cases, high noise can easily be mitigated by careful adjustment of the AGC-T.  For other types of noise, the Noise Blanker and/or Noise Reduction may be needed.  In the current SmartSDR code, these two feature work reasonable well, but there is a serious opportunity to improve their effectiveness greatly and we have committed to doing just that in SmartSDR v1.5.

Lee - N2LEE

Steve, I have a 6300 and have not found that lack of bandpass filters is an issue. Even the radios I have with filters do not do much for RX Noise.

If you have a serious noisy environment I suggest you consider a dedicated RX antenna. If you don't have room for a beverage consider something such as the Pixel Loop Pro-1b. For 160/80/40 they work great.

As Flex continues development on the software I am sure the noise reduction will improve but still a dedicated RX antenna is always an improvement.

Steven Hess

Thanks for the answers.
Would you say the AGC-T in SmartSDR is better than PowerSDR at this point? 

Jay -- N0FB

Has anyone used the 6300 in a Multi-Multi contest?  If so, how well did it play?

km9r.mike

Neat to learn. I do not have the advantage of gain through antenna directivity so some of the dx I am trying to work in a pileup is near my noise floor. To canx those who do not understand the term up, I will use filtering of 250 or less on cw and then I will employ cw peak and noise reduction and vary agc-t to to improve s/n ratio, however with filtering at 250 or less this seems to produce an undesired artifact. This only seems to be present when @ 250 or less and utilizing the cw peak option. If I reduce agc-t the magnitude of the artifact will decrease  but this can also start to reduce the ability to hear the weak cw signal.

I do not think this would be a factor at all if I had better antenna directional gain capability, but I do not and for now am looking forward to any improvements to a selectivity that is already the best that I have ever used in a radio's receiver.

Steven Hess

I like to run WSPR on multiple bands. I can do that with my 3000 and 1500 and the use of tuned stubs to notch out the signal from the other rig. I'm wondering how that will work here? Should be the same?