3.6.8 and CW

KD0RC

I'm not much of a contester, but this weekend I managed to participate in two of them. One was the CQ 160 meter CW contest and the other was Winter Field Day. Just for fun, I limited myself to CW during WFD.

So a whole weekend of nothing but CW, and my 6400 running 3.6.8 ran perfectly. While the CW dropout problem only happened rarely to me, this weekend it didn't happen at all. Since upgrading, I have had quite a few longish CW ragchews without a single problem, so I think version 3.6.8 well and truly fixed the CW issue.

johnn1jm

👍

John N1JM

DL4RCE

Can confirm that on my side as well.

Volker

John G3WGV

Yes, I think this longstanding and extremely frustrating bug has finally been fixed. Just in time for me - I was giving serious consideration to abandoning FlexRadio in favour of a new FTdx101D!

K1ESE

The new firmware resolved about half of my HelpDesk tickets. Great job.

K1ESE

Russ Ravella

Yeah, this was a great update. I've not seen a single complaint about CW in the almost month since it was released. Several other things were fixed as well.

Not only that but in the years I've owned my Flex I can't remember a s/w release that wasn't accompanied by serious new issues - often major ones. This time there doesn't seem to have been any. Flex has said they've hired a "test engineer" in leu of beta testing and (s)he seems to have hit the ball out of the park on this one.

My only concern is whether they'll keep it up. I had a very informative interaction with Steve Hicks on another forum but he didn't respond to my last reply to him trying to understand Flex's commitment to their ham business in concrete terms. That was disappointing.

Hopefully 3.7 will address the collection of MultiFlex bugs. The "Flex Insider" on 12/15 said v3.7 would be released "in conjunction with the shipment of the new Maestro" which will hopefully be in the next couple of weeks. One could imagine MultiFlex being part of that "conjunction" ? Anyway, super job on this update !

Russ KR6W

Mike-VA3MW

Russ

Flex has said they've hired a "test engineer" in leu of beta testing and (s)he seems to have hit the ball out of the park on this one.

Not quite true, and I am not sure where you heard that. We still have our Alpha Test team, and Nicholas who manages them.

73

k0oks

I sent them specific instructions as to how to reproduce the error, hence it got fixed.

Like a mechanic, developers can only fix what they can reproduce. So until they were able to actually see it there was no way they could even begin to fix it, even if they wanted to.

Lesson being-- if you want something fixed (with any software) spend some time and develop a series of reproducible steps to recreate the bug. And send them to support (and post here as well).

Russ Ravella

Mike:

I heard it from Steve Hicks and also from Tim at different times. Are you saying they misled me ? I don't think so ...

k0oks:

There were obviously several issues with CW and only time will tell if they all got fixed though so far, it seems they did. I'm glad to hear the one you reproduced was among them.

Russ KR6W

k0oks

If you encounter any more, narrow them down to something reproducible and report them...