Praise for Flex 6500 for Contesting

Just to follow up on my original post... I used my Flex 6500 the past two evenings to work the ARRL 160M CW contest. from my QTH 60 miles NW of San Antonio, TX. I have an inverted L for 160 and a K9AY loop for receiving. I was able to work every station I could hear. If I could see it on the panadapter, I could work it. I use SmartSDR 1.9.13, N1MM+ for logging, and CW Skimmer/SDR Bridge. What a great combination for a casual contester like me. According to CW Skimmer, at one point there were over 1000 stations on the air between 1800 kHz and 1875 kHz. I set the CW filter for 50 Hz and had no trouble separating stations. There were a number of DX stations on the air, including XE, TI, KP2, KP4, ZF, VY, and PJ9, along with most Canadian provinces. It was interesting to see how reception was sometimes better on the inverted L and sometimes on the K9AY loop. Conditions were better Friday night than Saturday night – however, the many filter and AGC adjustments available in SmartSDR made it easy to pull stations out of the QRN and QRM. Being able to see all the signals on the 160M band on the panadapter display was a definite advantage in planning my contesting strategy. Keep up the good work FRS! 73, Dale – K4DG