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Does FlexRadio have any future plans to create a hardware upgrade pathway?
Apple does this with selected products. At some point in the future I will want to move up to the 6700 from the 6500. I would prefer to trade in my existing 6500 (which could be reconditioned and resold at a mild discount but would carry a full warranty and be equivalent to the 6500 radios being sold new at that time). This would save me the complexity of selling it privately "As Is" to another individual, and make the acquisition of the 6700 - even a refurbished 6700 - more likely.
Thank you,
Justin
Thank you,
Justin
1
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Answers
We will however conditionally take a radio back for credit towards a higher model within the first 30 days of ownership.
Flex is a small privately owned firm with less than 20 employees. Flex is rightly not in the business of helping customers sell their used models. It's an unnecessary expense on already thin margins.
Flex should stay focused on their core mission.
Considering the dedication and the hours spent for all of them I think for most at Flex this is more a labour of love.
Hmm, I feel a new article coming. lol
The personnel at Flex are comprised of the kind of people that made this country great. It gives me hope.
Jim, K6QE
we looked at making all the processing a plug in module for the FLEX-6000 when it was designed. There were a few issues such as: 1) there are a large number of high-speed lines that that would have to go across connectors. This requires the use of connectors that preserve signal integrity at high speed which are generally fairly expensive. You often need something like double the connections in a connector system than you would on a PCB because of all of the ground routing requirements (on a PCB you just use a ground plane and a power plane). Then there's all of the extra work to route across the connectors, verify signal integrity, work any issues, etc. 2) With connectors there are always mechanical concerns -- will the connector fail over time, will the contacts corrode, will there be soldering issues in the factory, will the connector dislodge in a drop event, etc. (reliability) 3) You have to comprehend what you might need in the future ... that can be hard.
We weighed all of this and decided it was best not to incorporate plug in modules for all these reasons including cost, time-to-market, etc. There are thousands of decisions made in a design process and we try to make the decisions that are in both our best interests.
Also, the key reason to do this is to enable the swap to larger/faster computing components as they become available. For a PC software person, you just drop in the next processor and you are ready with more power. It's never this simple in the embedded world. We always have to trade off the effort to incorporate a new part vs. the advantage of the new part. We put very current parts in the FLEX-6000 radios -- they are all either the latest generation or one generation back currently, over two years after the design. This is decidedly not the case for many competitive products.
There is extreme flexibility in the hardware and software in this radio. If someone said -- we need this radio to be a 5MHz IF radio for a microwave station -- so it needs to receive and transmit a 5MHz swath of data, this is completely possible in the FLEX-6000. It just requires software. If someone said "we need only one receiver, but it needs diversity and it needs to continually attempt to decode 20 different digital modulation schemes, trying to figure out which scheme it sees," it's just software. These two are not likely requests from the ham community, but other things may come up. Things like a new digital mode that requires 20kHz of bandwidth on HF, etc. We'd like to be able to do these things when they come up.
And yes, we'll build new radios in the future too. And over time, they'll have more computing power. But we've engineered SmartSDR to run on different platforms so we are hoping that if there are things we do in the future on some new platform, that those things will also work on the existing platform whenever possible -- but that's a long time away.
As intermediate hardware upgrade I would like to see a low noise fan kit and a rugged box for 6300 portable operations. Something strong like Marshall amplified speakers.
During the Apollo Moon Program, NASA intensely debated whether the Lunar Module should have field-replaceable electronic modules. Some felt that serviceability by the astronauts might be a life-and-death matter, so they should make all electronics with access panels, racks and connectors and include in-flight spares. Also plug-in electronics would allow upgrades due to design improvements between manufacturing and flight. Money was no object, nor was "planned obsolescence" -- they simply wanted the best reliability, and every extra ounce and cubic inch was critical.
NASA found that designing electronics for field maintenance hurts weight, volume and reliability. Providing easy access to electronics limits packaging density. Including extra space for racks and connectors hurts reliability. They ultimately packed all electronics tight as possible, and "potted" the wires and modules in place with an epoxy-like adhesive.
Fast forward to today, and the basic principle still applies. However it's greatly magnified due to extreme clock rates, miniscule lead pitch, thermal issues,lead capacitance, etc. In CPU board design there's a big debate over going from LGA to BGA mounts which would eliminate the ability to field replace a CPU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_grid_array
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_grid_array
There's a saying in mechanical engineering: "complexity breeds failure". Minimizing mechanical complexity by eliminating connectors and access pathways is a valid engineering choice, even though it hurts serviceability and upgradeability. With things like FPGAs, to a degree the hardware can be updated under software command. Maybe that's the best way forward.
The flex meets or exceeds a great deal of the elecraft performance features. (will take some more work and listening to close in on a few more) But at the $4000 range some ability to provide expansion blocks would open a lot of doors. Elecraft achieved this by designing a rock solid modular platform with a solid and dependable upgrade path. And believe me they have been successful.
Know your competition. learn from your competition. exceed your competition. take your place at the top.
I run my 5000 and 6500 at the same time, 24 hours a day. However, the hook is I need two computers. One for the 5000 which I remote over Teamviewer and my 6700 which I remote with the same client computer. The 5000 is used with my SteppIR on 20/10 and the 6500 on 40 and 80. Also run my 6500 on the same host computer as my 5000 and remote both over the WAN using Teamviewer. Lots of fun.
Jim, K6QE