New Flex 6500 User

wb7ond

Received my Flex 6500 yesterday, easy to set up, have a Dell Inspirion 3847.  Set  up my digital modes pretty easy.  Easy to find info on Community and Help parts of Flex website.  Going to upgrade my vid card to GTX-750ti, pop me over the 1000 benchmark.  Listened to some great short wave last night, tried out the SAM.  DRM is next on my list, had that working on the 1500.  Now to see if Santa will bring a Maestro...  Fun radio..

WA2SQQ

Pls share how you get DRM setup

Ria

Welcome to the club! So far very impressed. 

Dan -- KC4GO

Glad to see others who listen to SW and perhaps utilities. Enjoy..

Bob K8RC

I see that 1st on your list is to upgrade the video performance of your computer. FWIW, unlike everything Flex that has gone before, the 6x00 series radios do all the computational heavy lifting inside the black box and not inside your computer. The computer is a 'thin client' display that really doesn't contribute to the radio's performance. SmartSDR runs just fine on an 8-year-old Pentium laptop with Intel on-board graphics I have. Rocket-fast video cards are cool but won't really affect the radio. Just wanted to make sure you knew. 73.

Ria

You mean SWLing DRM? Open a new slice or set an existing slice to USB, then tune to a DRM broadcast. Set the filter to 12kHz minimum. Then setup an audio DAX and start streaming it. Open your DRM a software such as DREAM or SoDiRa. Incidentally You'll need the codec DLL for dream which is not available with the dream distribution due to copyright. You will have to compile it yourself or get it compiled from someone else. SoDiRa doesn't need it.

In SoDiRa or Dream select the DAX you set up above as your input sound card. It should work with very little trouble.

WA2SQQ

Not able to compile the DLL file. Do you know of anywhere it can be obtained?

Ria

I used the DLL from SoDiRa. It works in older versions of Dream (which are floating around the net). 

Some alternatives to compiling are here including SoDiRa's DLL.

http://yyz-swl.blogspot.com/2012/07/dream-and-libfaad2.html

wb7ond

Thanks, I had seen that Tim recommended that the vid card have at least 1000 PassMark.  Mine is close about 700 or so.  But I notice that the numeric display  on, for example, the s-meter was almost illegible on my screen.  After some research I found a short enough card, and low wattage card, for a reasonable price on Amazon, as its an older technology card, but it will put me at about 3000.  I still run up my Flex 1500 at times, when I don't want to leave the 6500 run over night..  But thanks for the reminder, I am still studying the SmartSDR TM, and comments in the Community section.
Regards
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wb7ond

Yes, I have always enjoyed SWL, since I was an adolescent.  My old Lafayette KT-320 (I think) was my constant companion.  I had an ocean hopper before that, but most times forgot to shut it off, before grabbing the band coil through that little door.  Plate voltage "lived" in there too.  I soon mastered the art of regenerative sweet spot.  But the Lafayette was my first kit, and worked well with the wire strung into the oak tree.  I spent many an hour with the instructo-graph (code)  you could rent, but never mastered the code sufficient to get a license back then.
Regards
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Tim - W4TME

Bob - you wrote..

"The computer is a 'thin client' display that really doesn't contribute to the radio's performance."

That is basically true except for the video subsystem.  SmartSDR is a WPF application and will natively use the DirectX and hardware graphics acceleration capabilities of your video card to off-load the highly computational display rendering to the video card's GPU.  It does this automatically.  However, if your video subsystem meets the criteria for the app to use the video card for display rendering and it does not have the horsepower or worse, it is using slow RAM for buffering like what was the case with some early i3 / i5 CPUs, performance will suffer.

A "rocket fast" or gamer video card is not required, but one that is moderately priced and performs well on 2D rendering is worth the investment for an optimal user experience.

https://helpdesk.flexradio.com/hc/en-us/articles/202118528-What-is-important-in-choosing-a-Video-Gra...