8600 Delivery/LANs and range extenders

charlesjacobsen

I live in the UK and am considering buying an 8600. Can you please tell me the delivery time for this.

Remote access is very important for me. Can you please say if the LAN setup must be wired. I live in a large house and have it networked everywhere by using Powerline Adapters as Range extenders. Direct connections would be difficult. Would my system be OK?

Regards

Russ Ravella

Hi Charles,

I can't speak to the delivery time question but it appears Flex is getting near delivering the last of its existing orders so the turn around might not be too bad now. Also, some pressure has probably been relieved due to their newly announced Aurora product. Best of luck there.

As for your second question, I'd like to address that because the Flex person most likely to respond here, well, I'll just say is not very technical and is quite biased and has been "very unhelpful" in this regard in the past.

The radio itself does not have WiFi so it has to be connected via Ethernet cable (use good quality CAT 6 or 8). However, I live in a two story house not plumbed with Ethernet and faced this same problem years ago. To make matters worse, my radio is located upstairs and at the opposite end of the house from my WAN modem/router (read: long distance, floor and many, many walls). I first tried a power line adapter on both ends and plugged my LAN switch, into which my radio, Maestro, computer, etc are all wired, into it. That mostly worked but proved occasionally unreliable. Then I purchased a WiFi range extender and that did it. I've used it for years now and it has literally never, and I mean not a single time ever, not worked perfectly. There are so many devices in my house that connect via that same Wifi I can't even count them - no problem whatsoever. I'd offer up the model but it's long, long out of production and wasn't a high end one in the first place. Probably anything you'd buy these days would be fine (and it sounds like you already have one that possibly could be used for this ?)

So unless you have a really extreme configuration, you'll be fine. Note that the actual BW of the radio's Ethernet traffic is actually not that high (several MB at most) and can be adjusted down to nearly nothing with no impact on radio functionality and only minor impact (in my opinion) on display goodness. So it's really not surprising that this works. On the other hand, I use the ham computer without restriction and it works using the same connection perfectly as well.

Of course YMMV and I can only offer my own experience. But while the Flex person has advised in the past that doing this basically won't work, he's absolutely wrong. It works fine in my rather extreme situation and probably many, many others.

GL Russ KR6W

Erik Carling EI4KF

Delivery time in UK is short. The 8600 is in stock at Martin Lynch & Sons. You would receive it in days I would say.

As with Russ, I use Power Line extenders and never had a problem.

John KB4DU

I also use power line extenders. Mike indicates that some Flex testing has produced some interference, but I have not had any problem.

Jerry W2TXB

I would avoid using a power line extender, and initially used a PC connected directly (CAT5) to my radio.. When I upgraded my network at home to the Netgear Orbi (mesh) system, I directly connected the Flex to a RJ45 port on the node, and connected my PC to another port on the same node. The mesh network has surprisingly good range and coverage, neither my radio nor my PC ever misses a beat.

My only other option (not my best one by any means) was drilling holes and running cables for a "hard wired" connection; the mesh network does what I want, and then some.

charlesjacobsen

Russ/Erik,

Thanks for the detailed comments. My house sounds not unlike yours, Russ, as far as connectivity is concerned. I converted an upstairs bedroom into a shack a couple of years ago. It worked well, unlike my knees which decided that they did not like stairs any more, so I converted the downstairs dining room into a bedroom. I have little need to go upstairs apart from the shack and the remote capabilities of the 8600 are very tempting.

It is good to know that at least two people have no problems with extenders. I tried them many years ago but the walls in my house are very thick and reception was poor so I used adapters instead. I know that range extenders have improved a lot over recent years and will give them a go.

Thanks again.

charlesjacobsen

John/Jerry,

Thanks for adding your information to the ****. I now feel even more comfortable about buying the 8600.

charlesjacobsen

I don't know why there are asterisks in my last message. The missing word is "****".

charlesjacobsen

I give in. I'll let you know when I buy one.

Russ Ravella

Excellent, Charles ! At about 70 minus 3 months I definitely understand the knee thing. As it stand right now, the back thing is more of an issue for me. It looks like a race between body parts to see which gives out first ! Hope everything works out great for you.

73 Russ KR6W

charlesjacobsen

I finally succumbed to temptation and bought an 8600 with a Maestro. I have hooked it up to my adapters and it seems to work very well.

Understanding how it all works and how best to optimise it is going to take some time. Based on what I have done so far, it will take a long time! I anticipate spending a lot of time on this channel.

I had not really thought about having the radio upstairs while using the Maestro downstairs. I quickly discovered that in order to get the Maestro working, the radio had to be switched on. This involved a trip upstairs, so negating the whole point of the exercise. I need a remote on/off switch and see that there is a lot of stuff on this on this channel, so I know where I shall be starting.

Charles

Russ Ravella

Hi Charles,

Congratulations on your new stuff ! I'm glad it's working well. You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

As for turning your 8600 on and off, there's a cool feature built in that shows up as the "REM ON" RCA connector on the back. You can plug an ethernet controlled switch into that and turn the radio on and off remotely from anywhere using just a mobile device. There are about a million ways to implement it and Flex sells one on their website. Works perfectly. Plug that puppy in and set it up once (which is easy to do) and you'll never have to go up and down the stairs again to turn your radio on and off.

Just a comment in case it's of some use: it's not always obvious to new users what's going on with Flex radios at the 100,000 foot level. Flex's aren't actually "radios" in the conventional sense, they're "radio servers" - a box of computers. Users connect to them with "clients" just like any other computer server. That's why they have no conventional knobs or displays ("M" models too. The control panel on the front of "M" models is really a Maestro in disguise, attached and connected to a regular NON "M" model the same way as described below).

SSDR and the Maestro (along with the iPhone, iPad and Mac versions of SSDR) are clients. You connect to the radio server with one (or two in MultiFlex mode) such client. So the reason your Maestro doesn't work unless the radio is on is, it's job is to connect to a server (your 8600) and if the server isn't on, there's nothing to connect to. The Maestro by itself is not a radio and basically just sits there when you turn it on waiting for a client to connect to. There are a lot of advantages to this approach which I won't elaborate here but the obvious one is easy remote operation.

GL Russ KR6W

David Decoons, wo2x

I would highly recommend you check out the new users playlist of videos on Flex’s YouTube channel. They answer a lot of questions a new user may have and offer tips and guidance to familiarize yourself with the radio and SmartSDR. There are many other videos on the site.

73 Dave wo2x

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJteC7p59ZU&list=PLcubIF34IGQsV_G1p1JiCNhEzxwlsKHRN