FT8 on Mac with 6600M

Neil D Friedman N3DF

My 6600M is cabled directly to my router. If I also cable my MacBook Air to the router, is it possible to work FT8 on the MacBook while controlling SmartSDR on the front panel of the 6600M?

Ted VE3TRQ

Absolutely, Neil - I do that all the time. I used to only run xCat and xDax plus wsjt-x or JS8Call on my MacMini. I'd control everything that CAT through the digital apps would not allow me to do by using the M front end.

Now that I updated to V3, and also have SSDR for Mac, I actually run both xDax/xCat plus DAX/CAT from SSDR Mac. I did have a conflict between xCat and SSDR Mac initially (the radio got all confused), but I found that if I started SSDR first, the radio kept its cookies in. I am now running xCat/xDax to the two slices on the "M" front panel, and CAT/DAX to either one or two slices running on the Mac on SSDR Mac. I think I'm going to need to buy that external video card for the MacMini so I can run enough monitors for all that :-) I currently have a 24 inch 1920x1200 and a 27 inch 5K monitor at full res.

This is an amazing radio with a bunch of good software.

[Edited to add some more detail.]

K3SF

yes....is the short answer

i would recommend xdax and xcat s/w from mario

https://dl3lsm.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html

i easily run two instance of wsjtx on mac mini...

will also need something like loopback to route audio from xdax to wsjtx

Paul K3SF

K3SF

script for two instance of ft8

i have used this to build a script to open multiple instances of wsjtx for ft8

do shell script "open -n /Applications/HamRadio/WSJT/wsjtx.app --args -r SliceA "

do shell script "open -n /Applications/HamRadio/WSJT/wsjtx.app --args -r SliceB "

paul K3SF

Mark_WS7M

As others have said,

Yes this can be done. xCat and xDax work very well. However, recently I've started to only use xCat as the built in DAX in SmartSDR for Mac works well and it fires up automatically with the software if you want it to.

So I have a "station control program" I wrote that starts up the various apps in order. I've asked Marcus to add an auto-connect to the radio feature in SmartSDR for Mac. Don't know when we'll see it but for single radio dudes like myself I don't need to be presented with a choice of radios. I just want it to connect.

So my little program just starts SmartSDR, gives me a short period to connect, then starts xCat and WSJT-X. I can easily do FT8 from my laptop or my desktop.

Mark_WS7M

As others have said,

Yes this can be done. xCat and xDax work very well. However, recently I've started to only use xCat as the built in DAX in SmartSDR for Mac works well and it fires up automatically with the software if you want it to.

So I have a "station control program" I wrote that starts up the various apps in order. I've asked Marcus to add an auto-connect to the radio feature in SmartSDR for Mac. Don't know when we'll see it but for single radio dudes like myself I don't need to be presented with a choice of radios. I just want it to connect.

So my little program just starts SmartSDR, gives me a short period to connect, then starts xCat and WSJT-X. I can easily do FT8 from my laptop or my desktop.