Advice for on 6600 and Maestro use for contesting

John, G3WKL

I'm try to assist a newly licensed ham who is interested in contesting. He's looking at buying a 6600 and a Maestro so that he can locate the former near to his antennas and then operate the Flex over his LAN from his shack in the house. I've had a Flex and Maestro for about 4 years but don't do much contesting, but when I do I use SSDR with N1MM+ on my PC, and importantly can operated using the F-keys on N1MM+ as well as filling in occasionally with the key.

Trying to do the same with N1MM+ and a Maestro I don't get sidetone in the Maestro from N1MM+ F-key generated code. Looking in this forum it appears to be a known issue, rather than my configuration. It's possible that routing sidetone back to the Maestro falls into the 'too difficult' category.

So the advice to help my friend that I seek is

a) the proposed separation of Flex and Maestro, as my friend proposes, something that contesters do, or

b) do they operate remotely within their LAN using SSDR, N1MM+ and either swap a key for CWX for filling in or remote the Flex audio output (with its sidetone) back to the shack?

Keep safe everyone, and Season's Greetings

John, G3WKL

Neil D Friedman N3DF

Gee, when I was a newly-licensed ham I contested with the Heath DX60/HR10.

Kari Gustafsson SM0HRP

Simplest way is to use NQ6N remote keyer at the PC. It will generate a local sidetone. This requires a winkeyer at the PC and a USB to RS-232 adapter cable to route the keyer output of the winkeyer to the PC.

Other means is with the Remote Rig boxes.

All this assumes N1MM (or other log program) to do the contest keying.