Dayton 2016

Burt Fisher

How? There is a No Contest 6300? It filters out contests

KY6LA_Howard

Yes. It's the off switch.

JB

So was the desert at the Banquet designed to not damage all of those tablets. laptops, iPads, etc.? Any metrics on spilled drinks and/or coffee? Can you indeed pour champagne on a Maestro like they do in the Samsung phone commercials?

W9OY

This is America you can do whatever you want

JB

Lee: What? You do know this was tongue and cheek right?

Rick Hadley - W0FG

The DL8MRE app looks like it's going to be great. Thanks for the demo, Howard!

SteveJ

6300 blows away the 7300? Not a fair comparsion sine the 6300 with a Masetro has a much higher cost.

Steve K9ZW

It is pretty neat marketing to suggest buys also buy a competitive product which has a certain marketplace buzz going. We know the 7300 is not actually exchangeable as a product with the 6000 series, no matter what the buzz says. Some prospects will end up taking the challenge of buying and trying both. And conceivably some will keep both, some will return the Flex and some will trade in the 7300. Return of the Flex is not different than the present 30 day offer, which itself makes a lot of sense with a product that some buyers will not "bond" with. Trade is of a 30 day old 7300 isn't awful as a proposition having gained a Flex customer in the process and securing a decent trade in known to be popular. The cost differential is a stretch both in radio dollars and in the dollars & effort to put the radios to use. The Flex is a bigger investment but the rewards as also not equally balanced. FRS challenge is all about their belief that a ham in the prefers performance to just having an inexpensive radio. A win for FRS is so many ways. And it is a win for Icom as it kind of "gives permission" to also have a 7300 and directs Flex comparisons towards a quality established competitor. Right now a ham has a lot of very fine choices in HF rigs. Putting a FRS buzz and bold offer out is a great bit of marketing. That the ham, FRS and the contrasting competitor Icom all end up with a winning result is masterful. Very cool! 73 Steve K9ZW

EA4GLI

We are talking Dayton and you (SteveJ) and N2WQ are constantly bringing up the Icom 7300. It is getting to obsession levels. At least SteveJ brings other things to the forum but ....N2WQ.... all your 31 posts so far.... IC-7300.... Dude!! I think your points about the value proposition from Icom have been noted by all. I think you have been treated respectfully by the mods of this forum who have allowed you to speak your mind freely. Respectfully, would you both be so kind as to give it a rest? Let us all enjoy ham radio and let us enjoy our Flex radios.... Don't go away... just change the subject. Please!!

W9OY

Jon of course! So was my comment

km9r.mike

@n2wq. It is not Flex's problem that their competitors do not offer a 30 day free trial offer. In fact Flex is going out of their way to run a shadow 30 day 90% free offer for the competition. Seems to me Flex is taking all the risk. Of course at the end of the day, quality always beats quantity.

Walt - KZ1F

Tell me again who's obsessing over the 7300? For instance, when I was at EMC, large network based storage, we virtually never ever mentioned NetApp and their entry level storage solutions. We ceded the entry level storage market to them. That, btw, meant not constantly comparing their low end products to our high end products. Doing so only acknowledges they are strong competition for the same market segment. Too much hand wringing folks.

Steve K9ZW

Different styles and different marketing techniques of course. Both approaches have validity, but ignoring the marketplace without strategically positioning against the competition is the only very high risk option. Even that approach has worked too. In this instance hobby industry pundits braved to claim the 7300 was an equivalent choice at a much lower price point. Silly stance as a firm as wise as Icom would have priced higher if the product offered the same. 73 Steve K9ZW

KY6LA_Howard

Flex Radio portable Stack Three 6300, one 6500 with power supply and net switch in one portable case driving a bunch of Maestros

EA4GLI

Gerald LIVE now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFWekyIIyS4

EA4GLI

So the functionality is there to use several Maestros with one 6500-6700?

KY6LA_Howard

Multi client is Planned. But not there yet for public consumption

Al_NN4ZZ

There were 3 cases with 4 radios each....so it was 1 to 1. Here is a pic of Tim setting it up on Thursday evening. Regards, Al / NN4ZZ

Walt - KZ1F

Now, this is strictly intended as an academic conversation. Clearly Gerald has the right to do whatever he prefers san advice from the peanut gallery.My take is the best way to cement the 7300 as a worthy opponent is to indicate to prospects it IS a worthy opponent. This is why I made the suggestion to force the prospective customer base to view it as competition for the 1500, not 6000 series. Certainly there are those that worship at the alter of Sherwood and their purchasing decisions is driven by where a rcv ranks, independent of whether the human ear can discern that difference. I would suspect, what is the primary differentiator is knobs, dials and switches vs no knob dials and switches. This is why I suggested a kick **** 6000 or 7000 series would have the outside of a 990S (good sized, very readable) and the insides of a 6000 series, complete with the Linux SSDR, complete with the same API, be it tcp based or udp based and flexlib or their facsimiles, XPSLib, Dogpatch, Stu's. My skin in the game? I'd buy that. I wouldn't pay an extra $1200 for a knob however.  Why do I say this? It appears that a vast majority of existing 6000 series users ponied up the addition $1,000-$1200 to go to a traditional UI, knobs and dials and VFO-a, VFO-b. I'd suspect every company even thinking of entering the SDR market noticed that.

The second tier differentiator is price. And that is a completely different conversation.

If the 7300 wipes out the 6300 market, it wasn't a silly stance at all.

John - AF3K

Thank you to the Flex team for a great experience at Dayton this year. Nice booth, informative banquet, the opportunity to talk directly to staff and other Flex users is much appreciated.

Jay -- N0FB

I would love to find out how they rack mounted the 6300's.  I would love to get a 4 or 6U GatorBox like that and mount my radio, antenna tuner and power supply.

Al_NN4ZZ

Back in Atlanta so fixed the picture ( some reason when posting form my iPad on the drive back it wouldn't orient correctly).   Had to repost - couldn't edit the previous post. 

There was one cabinet with 4 radios at the end of each table end and one between the tables for a total of 12 radios.  

Regards, Al / NN4ZZ  
al (at) nn4zz (dot) com
6700 - HW.................... V 1.6.21.77
SSDR / DAX / CAT...... V 1.6.21.159
Win10

KF4HR

Saw the excellent Flex display at Dayton and met some of the staff.  Best of all I was told that all the Maestro pre-orders should be filled by the end of June.

W9OY

The 7300 is what it is, a cheap entry level radio with pretty decent performance because it's a SDR, and SDR's want to perform.  Even my $50 softrock works well except for some overload.  The audio in the softrock is fabulous using Rocky software.  The 7300 is in competition against a far more deluxe entry level radio from Flex the 6300.  Scenario:

You bought a 7300 on a whim.  Heck it was only $1500 but that kind of socked it to the free cash for Dayon budget but you've been wanting to give this SDR thing a whirl for a l ong time.   No matter you have the room and tix so your going to Dayton anyway.  The 7300 works pretty well!  The audio is fabulous both RX and TX the selectivity is great even without $800 worth of roofing filters.  You like the display except it's kind of small but the menu system helps make up for that.  It kind of works like your old IC-735 but man it's SDR!  You are now a SDR convert.  You don't like the fact the power sometimes randomly cuts in half or the fact it won't tune anything greater than 3.0:1 and sometimes the RX overload light flashes on but man no roofing filters!  Your now a SDR convert and pretty hot for the whole SDR experience

You head out to Dayton with 30,000 of your closest friends and wander by the Flex booth.  You know Flex has been doing SDR for a long time.  They have their entry level 6300 set up next to a 7300.  WOW LOOK AT THAT DISPLAY!  The tuner works great!  Power out is rock solid!  The demo guy shows you how you can hook up JT65 in about 3 clicks, dang!  You've been wanting to try JT65 and it does RTTY and PSK and connects to DXLab and N1MM+ and Winkey almost automatically  CWSkimmer WOW  You've read on the DX forums about CW Skimmer and this thing uses it almost natively.  You thought maybe using a computer as a client would be an issue but it isn't hard to use at all.  Wait a minute there is a deal.  You can try a 6300 for 30 days and if you like it Flex will restore 90% of the Dayton budget you blew on the 7300....  

If you think the newly minted 7300 SDR convert is going to be conned into believing his radio is somehow like a 1500 think again.  If I were Flex I would bring a 7300/6300 demo to every hamfest and the 90% invoice deal.  And some training on the ease of setting up things like the digi modes etc.  

The real competition is between analogue $800 roofing filter radios that are noisy and sound like **** and SDR.  The 7300 is the destruction part of creative-destruction the 6300 is the creative part

73  W9OY

Steve-N5AC

This.

km9r.mike

@w9oy….Lee what is the creative-destruction theory in general. I have not heard this idea before.

W9OY

Creative destruction in a sentence is out with the old in with the new.  It's an economic theory that describes a business cycle of innovation.  Consider the iPhone vs the flip phone that preceded it.  More formally from wiki :

According to Schumpeter, the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one"

73 

EA4GLI

I think that considering the Maestro only an addition of knobs and dials to the 6000 series is very narrow view.

There are several things that make the Maestro interesting (for me) including the dials... but mainly portability-remote operation.

The fact that I can operate from "anywhere" within the LAN, WAN with the use of VPN and WAN natively (in the near future) is a great deal.

Just to give you an example, in order to do that with the TS2000 that I have in Spain which I operate remotely from Barbados, I had to purchase a $500 remoterig kit and a $400 RC2000 front panel and several cables including Serial-to-USB cables at both ends. Roughly $1100. (No computers needed and no panadapter display). I can work digital mode if I add another $200 to $300 worth of equipment with a couple of signalinks.

If I want to use the 7300 remotely I have to purchase 2 computers (2 x $400 - trying to come up with a reasonable PC cost including mouse-keyboard and monitor, it could easily be more) plus the software ($100) plus the knob ($250) and then I lose the knobs and dials but I do get a panadapter display.. not sure how effective this setup would be for CW.

If I want to do the same thing with Elecraft you need a $700 front panel, $500 remote rig and $150 of cables and power supplies. For $1350 you can get a working solution to operate remotely with a front panel with knobs and dials. No panadapter.

All of these systems have me tether unless I add a $120 wifi adapter to the remoterig and a 12v battery. So add that to the RemoteRig solution.

I dig RemoteRig, it works very well, it is a very well design product and I use it daily. If they are in business and different radio companies are offering remoting solutions it is because there is a market for it.

If you look at it this way you realize that the maestro is a pretty interesting proposition and the price is reasonable. Thinking of the Maestro as adding knobs to please or attract "traditionalist" seems to me like the wrong understanding of the device. I get mine in a couple of days.

Please do not read my post as just a comparison between the different approaches.... I just wanted to point out that the maestro is not a glorified knob.... I think it is much more than that. 

EA4GLI

Did you guys see the Wireless Holding DV4mobile? That seems to be one of the most interesting things out of Dayton this year.

http://wirelesshold.com/dv4home-2-1.aspx


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvJ4MmnZlr4


Really cool.

Peter K1PGV

Yet... There has GOT to be a large segment of the market that is "put off" by a rig with no knobs or switches. The question becomes: are they your target market? Do you cede the knobs and switches crew to the competition, and make the big display one of you key differentiating factors? At the cost of a flex plus a Maestro, I don't think you get much of that crowd except for the high-end folks. But maybe that's all you want. Or do you follow-up the Maestro with an "all in one box" that leverages your existing investment in the 6000 series plus what you have in the Maestro? And how much diversity can you realistically support in your product line? Trying to figure that out is what would get ME up in the morning, if I was a senior manager at Flex. Really interesting business question. Peter K1PGV