New-to-me 6600M and Multiflex sharing with myself

ai4uc

Hi folks,

I have owned a 6400 (non-M, s/n 1723-) for a couple of years - and I love it so much that I recently got a new-to-me 6600M (s/n 3318-). Paid for the license upgrade to v3 last night, upgraded to 3.10.10 (admittedly not quite the latest but it's what the 6400 is already on) and have been wrapping my head around trying to get one of my favored workflows working with the 6600M.

The shack is in the basement. The 6400 isn't even on top of the bench, it lives underneath, sitting backwards so the connectors are easily accessible, and I like to share it between SmartSDR running on a 1u server in the rack on the other side of the basement for digital modes (access via VNC) and a Maestro A on my desk upstairs in my office, for voice QSOs. That way I can listen to the usual suspects on 40 and 17 during the day, maybe join in, while JTDX is happily skimming whatever band I left it on and sending off reports to pskreporter.

Now I'm trying to do the same thing with the 6600M, but the difficulty is that Multiflex (maybe it should be called BiFlex?) only seems to support two simultaneous clients to matter how many SCUs or slices you have available - and the built-in Maestro that is on the front panel of the 6600M seems to be taking up slot 1 already, meaning that I can only talk to it with one client at a time. Kicking it off seems to momentarily work - but it looks like it's causing a reboot shortly thereafter.

Is there a way to make this work? Am I missing something here? Searching in the knowledge base was not immediately helpful, but I figured I'd ask here before opening a ticket. I figure I can't be the only person wanting to share a -M radio between two local clients on the same LAN and not use the front panel.

Mike-VA3MW

Hi…

Yes, MultiFlex only support 2 unique clients. You should be able to never use the front panel if you like as we do it all the time. If the radio is rebooting, that is not normal and it is time to open a support ticket for us to dig a bit deeper.

73

KD0RC

Another thing to check out is the use of SmartControl. Look in section 9 of the Maestro User Guide. This will allow you to have two other client connections, one of which can be controlled by the Maestro. The Maestro will not have the panadapter or waterfall active in this mode.

ai4uc

Thank you both. It's a little more complex than I initially thought; the Maestro was showing (in the fine print) getting stuck on APD calibration mode which was curious since the 6600M doesn't support APD. After goofing around with it some more and multiple OS installs to try to sidestep that and a roached license key, I now have the dreaded triple red blink and suspect that the SD card is kaput (to be fair, a 7 year old SD card dying is hardly newsworthy) so I'm opening a ticket. Hopefully once I get good software on a good card, things will magically start working a whole lot better.