SWR Meter and Maestro Tune Behavior

W9WLX_Chuck

Hello—I want to put this out there to see if anyone else has run across this.  Fortunately, I was able to rectify the problem.  I’m running a Flex 6600 with v3.1.11.  I did the upgrade to 3.1.11 on 4/30 immediately after it became available and followed the instructions explicitly.  I should have had a fresh restart of everything.  I don’t recall if I started seeing the following immediately after the update.

I started noticing on 6 meters that my SWR meter would go full scale when the radio was keyed with no RF output (in SSB with no audio or RF Power slider at 0).  This was happening with Smart SDR and Maestro.  I didn’t check the iOS client.  All other bands behaved as you would expect.  Where I operate the most, my actual SWR on 6 meters is 1.4:1.  It wasn’t too distracting when I was operating meteor scatter using MSK144 since it is a 100% duty cycle mode, but on SSB, the SWR meter would deflect opposite the RF Power meter!

Another issue that was happening at the same time was the Tune button on Maestro would not generate any RF output if one of the four SSB modes was selected.  If switched to any other mode, the Tune button would generate a carrier at 5 watts, my profile/TX band setting.  This occurred on all bands.  The Tune button on Smart SDR behaved normally on all bands.

So I saved the profiles and did a cold reset along with a factory reset.  I also renamed the FlexRadio Systems folder in my C:\Users<<Account Name>>AppDataRoaming directory so Smart SDR would recreate a new one when started.

With a fresh start and everything at default settings, the two problems were gone.  So I started restoring settings one group at a time and found that the Profile Preferences seemed to be causing the issues.  I fully restored the radio except for Profile Preferences and both clients still behaved normally (SWR meter and Maestro Tune function) on all bands.  Great, since rebuilding Profile Preferences was trivial when compared to what I had blown away initially and the COM ports I ghosted by recreating the FlexRadio Systems folder.  Also, the Auto Tuner seems to be working a bit better.  I still believe it should do a better job in many scenarios, but I had 100% failure on 6m when trying to tune a bit higher in the band where the SWR is 2:1.  It tuned quickly to an SWR of 1.3:1 after the fix.

Sorry for the long-winded message but I was wondering if anyone had seen something like this?  If you are, you can probably short-cut by a profile restore and exclude the Profile Preferences.

-73, Chuck

Bill -VA3WTB

This is one small problem with profiles. Some people reset their Flex then import their profiles not realizing that there may be a setting or two in the profiles that could cause problems in the way the radio works. In some cases it may be best to set things up that fixes a problem then re save that profile as the gold standard. sometimes people save a profile not knowing that there are settings causing problems.