Flex 3000 and Firewire

Gary Schulz

I am looking to get my Flex 3000 back on the air because I never really used it much in the first place and it is essentially a brand new radio but I am facing the proverbial problem of how to interface it to a Windows machine.  Is there an adapter that can be used to connect it to a NUC or equivalent HW?  I guess it would need a Firewire to USB interface of some sort.  What is the best way to get this radio to run?

Advice appreciated.

Gary

John M5ET

Ted VE3TRQ

I believe there are some replacement tops for NUCs that provide for expansion. These things are PCIe, so if a compatible F/W card can be found, it _may_ be possible.

Jim Keller

Gary Schulz

DH2ID

John

If you have the PCIe port then look on ebay for 400mb firewire card 1394 or similar. They normally come with 2way or even 4 way ports, so you have a spare incase

Ted VE3TRQ

Looks like the expansion lids for NUCs are video, USB and network function oriented - no PCI expansion :-( Although apparently if you are willing to kludge it, the M.2 i/f in the box is PCIe-compatible .

Dudley WA5QPZ

Ted,

You will have to use a standard PC, or laptop with a PCI Express slot in it. There are not many around with the PCI express slot.   The iMac with the Thunderbolt ,  running BootCamp and Windows natively works well..   If you look on EBay you will still find laptops with FW,  just stay away from any with JMicron chipsets,  many of the Dells had this low grade chipset.  Most will be Core2Duo  processor based and are slow but will function,  later Dell laptops with early i7 chips, had a terrible PCIe driver,  caused the FW to eat a lot of CPU cycles..   When running on slower processor,  you should have an GPU card or video card to take the graphic load off the processor..   My extended experience.. 

Dudley
WA5QPZ

Gary Schulz

Charlie_KB8CR