I'm A Bit Disappointed in V2.0

John - K3MA

Ria and others.  I did not say SmartLink does not bring some new things to the table.  My response was to correct what I think is a over sell by the poster.  I have used many remote solutions.  Just like radios there is no remote solution that provides everything.  Look at a solution like remotehams.com which has been around for a few years.  It does some things remotely that SmartLink will now provide, SmartLink will do some things which it will not do and it does somethings that SmartLink will not do.  To state that SmartLink is "first in the industry" is just over blowing things.

It has had some modern features such as multiclient, internal chat amongst uses, Andriod app, multiradio support.....

Varistor

IMHO dropping radio prices is good news for the ham community as it lowers the entry cost for the hobby. Unfortunately it is bad news for the vendors and the weaker ones will vanish.

I also believe the end of $6,000 radios. Seems $3500 is the new high end range.

Tony Taddeo

Using Flexradio servers to securely broker a connection between a radio and a client on the public internet is the innervation bit. Do you have any examples of this?UPnP is just plumbing.

Varistor

DDNS is the oldest and simplest auto discovery mechanism.

UPnP is notorious for its security vulnerabilities and should be avoided as the plague considering there are numerous alternatives for auto discovery and P2P communications.

BTW, I am keeping a 100% open mind. Need another radio for my contesting station and have been waiting to see what both Flex and Icom will actually deliver. One of the key criteria is the ability to do contesting remotely- manage the entire station, not just the radio- when I don't feel like driving 700 miles each way.

Steve W6SDM

The free market will pretty much determine the price of radios.  Entry level hams usually buy either used or inexpensive radios, like the Yaesu FT-450., and then upgrade as they find their niche in the hobby.  I advise new hams to put their money into their antenna, tuner, and power supply before they spend a lot on a high-end radio.

Hams who can afford them are still buying high-end radios like the $12,000+ IC-7851 and others.  If they didn't, manufacturers wouldn't be building them.  

The really nice thing about Flex is that it allows someone to get into SDR at a reasonable price and then upgrade as their capabilities and interests change.

Ria

UPnP is one piece of the whole puzzle. What you're saying is like Tesla using a touch screen isn't special since other cars have it.

The whole system is innovative and right now one of a kind. A non-techie can buy a radio, plug it into their router, sign in, pair the radio then leave home and use it on their iPhone. NO other radio mfg does that. 

Rich McCabe

No doubt the first manufacturer "turn key" solution. Being a MCSE and talking to many hams, I can assure you that most of them will benefit from the new Flex system as most are not capable of telling you where the router is in their house let alone how to log in to it.

Steve W6SDM

I think mine's under the sink, next to the Ajax.

Ria

 but the VSP driver was stated by Tim to be a v2.0 upgrade "feature". 

No, it was not. It was listed in the improvements for 2.0 but since it corrects an existing defect it will be in the 1.x maintenance release.

Ria

Yep. I actually had someone tell me that the $20,000 Hilberling PT-8000a is a marvellous radio. I can't see myself owning one but I can understand why some would want to. 

Personally, being licensed 20 years in ham radio and DXing and contesting as my focus I don't see myself using a cheap, entry level transceiver anymore. I will want the best even if it costs a little more.

We should also be careful about the race to the bottom - you don't find "good" tools in the home stores anymore. You have to buy them from the guy with the truck, and they're usually sold to pros who would buy them. The reason for this is that cheap sells, even if it is inferior quality.

Ria

Tony Taddeo

Your being silly now. DDNS?  Brokering a connection is a lot more than finding your radio on the internet.

"UPnP is notorious for its security vulnerabilities and should be avoided as the plague considering there are numerous alternatives for auto discovery and P2P communications."  Really? Have you turned UPnP off in your router as from you previous post you are not new to P2P protocols?

I would trust the Flexradio engineers who have done there due diligence on this matter over someone with a half baked understanding of the technology.

Varistor

Without a doubt the concept of simplicity and zero-configuration is universally attractive. Why would anyone want to waste time fiddling with network settings?!

It is the execution that is troubling. Given the fact that there are viable alternatives to UPnP, IMHO FRS is exposing the very same hams they are trying to help to unnecessary and avoidable risk. UPnP devices are the lowest hanging fruit for any bad guys who want to create massive traffic on the internet resulting in denial of services. I am not even concerned about the router and home network of the poor guy who enabled UPnP.

Tony Taddeo

Turn UPnP off in your router if you like. Stop taking baths as people die doing that and what ever you do don't drive a car.

Varistor

Brokering the connection is one of the MANY options to achieve the simple task of the client finding the server. So yes, DDNS is completely viable option to achieve the said goal.

Yes, I have avoided using UPnP for decades. None of my routers even support UPnP.

No, I don't trust the FRS engineers and this is nothing personal. After 20 years of doing security work I still find engineers/developers to be the most consistent weak link. Statements like "we use SHA-256 for encryption" further erode this trust.

Ria

Most people have UPnP enabled in their router already. The security risks are that a piece of malware could open a port and then allow inbound access to your network. Even if this happens, your radio is unaffected. 

In other words, the security risk is already there, Flex is not increasing it. 

Ria

BTW, I love the fact that on the 6600, you can now listen to 20M and 6M on 2 different antennas. 

I love this feature on my 6700.

Varistor

Most people don't even understand what the risks of UPnP are as this discussion has illustrated. While there is risk to your home network, the much bigger and real risks, with real consequences is TO OTHERS.

The issue with UPnP is the kernel which is ridden with vulnerabilities allowing the bad guys to gain control of routers and turn them into spam and denial of service zombies. In other words, the real risk is to other people, not to you per se. So saying "I don't care about UPnP vulnerabilities" means you don't care about how you personally contribute to spam. One of the largest denial of service attacks in 2017 was due to zombie web cams. In the same line of thinking, FRS contributes to the propagation of spam and denial of service attacks on other people.

Now I completely understand that this is not the kind of message people on this board want to read, but often the truth is hard to swallow.

Tony Taddeo

Rubbish. Too many inaccuracies, half truths to bother correcting.

KY6LA_Howard

I would like to point out that several of the above wants ALREADY EXIST in SSDR for iOS 1. Alternative Colors. I can actually see the Meters on my iPad which are totally invisible on,my 27" Windows monitors 2. Band Markers. Have existed since the beginning of SSDR for iOS However. You can easily add them to SSDR by setting permanent TNF On the edges. 3. Spots on the display - a paid extra option in SSDR for iOS. Works great. Makes DXing easy I remote operate a great deal and I find the iOS app is superb So if you cannot live without any of the above features, get the iOS app There are also idea threads on this community for you to vote on features that you want. Obviously Remote got the most votes this time around. I would suspect that Multi-Client is a close second especially since it's needed for the M editions. IIRC that Flex is bringing on a GUI programmer. But. Remember it took years before PowerSDR got skins. Ultimately good things will come but getting them right takes longer and predicting when they might happen is an exercise in futility

Steve K9ZW

Simple enough for those not wanting UPnP is that old port forwarding. Simple, easy, done deal and for you life is blissfully just fine. 73 Steve K9ZW

Ned K1NJ

Doug,

   But, I *like* sunspots.  More of them make better propagation.  Once in a while
a solar flare will upset things; they can be nasty.
   Please accept my poor attempt at a flame.

                 Ned,  K1NJ

Mike VE3CKO

I have my eyes wide open and I see SmartLink as something no other company in the ham radio business has ever come close to achieve. Some will refuse to take their blinders off cannot see the trees through the forest. SmartLink will basically duplicate much of the in-the-shack SmartSDR experience remotely to any where in the world with an internet connection.
I remember having a conversation with an Anon user and referred to Flexradios as appliances, as if it were an insult. My comeback was, and that's a bad thing?  When I play radio I don't want to spend time tinkering or getting a hold of someone who tweaked this portion of the software are try to find someone who knows someone who knows someone that can fix the issue. I want to turn on the radio and play. Period.
SmartLink will simplify remote operation thus allowing operators who are not that IT literate to remote. Again, the radio server conceptualized by Flexradio is about to grow some wings.

Mike VE3CKO

SmartSDR is about get wings, with SmartLink. If you want to remote the old way that's ok, but I certainly want to have all in-the-shack Flexradio radio experience as possible when I do remote.

Varistor

For those who want to know the facts and form their own opinion, here's a good paper, with hard data and no emotions, that quantifies and qualifies the issue. While the paper was written in 2013 with data collected in 2012, not much has changed because:

1) Most consumers never bother updating the firmware of their router, web cam, smart thermostat, etc.
2) Vendors, by and large, are ignoring the problem

The UPnP protocol suffers from a number of basic security problems, many of which have been highlighted over the last twelve years. Authentication is rarely implemented by device manufacturers, privileged capabilities are often exposed to untrusted networks, and common programming flaws plague common UPnP software implementations. These issues are endemic across UPnP-enabled applications and network devices.

The statistics in this paper were derived from five and a half months of active scanning. UPnP discovery requests were sent to every routable IPv4 address approximately once a week from June 1 to November 17, 2012. This process identified over 81 million unique IP addresses that responded to a standard UPnP discovery request. Further probes determined that approximately 17 million of these systems also exposed the UPnP Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) service to the world. This level of exposure far exceeded the expectations of the researchers.

This paper quantifies the exposure of UPnP-enabled systems to the internet at large, classifies these systems by vendor, identifies specific products, and describes a number of new vulnerabilities that were identified in common UPnP implementations. Over 1,500 vendors and 6,900 products were identified that are vulnerable to least one of the security flaws outlined in this paper. Over 23 million systems were vulnerable to a single remote code execution flaw that was discovered during the course of this research.

Ria

The FBI had admitted it was wrong about UPnP. The problem is not with UPnP itself. Microsoft Patched XP to fix it. This was in 2001. 

However, yes, some routers do have a problem with UPnP, as in they don't validate input correctly among other things. But again, this is NOT the fault of the protocol itself, and is definitely not the fault of SmartLink. 

But again - if you don't want UPnP, you don't need it. You can manually forward ports. 

Tony Taddeo

Hi N2WQ (Varistor)

Why don't you do something useful and start a new post "Disabling UPnP in your router" with screen captures from your own setup, together with the additional port forwarding required for those that seek this.

To lighten things up, I am also a Google Search (medical) expert. Please find my findings on

"There are many other tragic examples of death by water."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-drinking-too-much-water-can-****/

Wayne Westfield

How do you see it before buying it?

Ken Hansen

Download the v2.0 documentation - it's not a secret, you're just not interested in actually making an effort to find out what is in the release.

Gary L. Robinson

I also don't fit the contester, competitive dxer, or remote user crowd BUT I still like my 6300 immensely.  And if Flex NEVER adds another interface feature OR another functionality feature it won't change an iota how I feel about the rig OR Flex Radio.  Anything added, I see as icing on the cake.

However,  I am one of the relatively small group who likes to write C# (and C++) code.  So, I add many of my own features exactly the way I want them.  The biggest feature that convinced me to go with the 6000 series was the c# API that was available.

At the end of the day - Flex (like most other relatively small companies) has to use it's finite resources to please the majority of their customers as best they can and some folks will be less happier than others.

Norm - W7CK

Ken,

You can already remote a Flex 6000 with the old classic GUI front panel.  I've been doing it for over 4 years now.  Its called RCForb.   Works great.  No panadapter or waterfall, but it works and it is very dependable.

Norm - W7CK