Latency in Contesting

I am mostly a CW contester and not a big one recently or ever for that matter but here are some thoughts:

Latency comes in two forms:

A) time it takes out output your signal to RF

B) time it takes for you to hear the incoming signal

Very serious contesters want both of these values to be at their absolute minimum and one person a few years back spent a lot of time measuring the time from key down (cw in his case) to RF out. As I recall the numbers he came up with were comparable to knob rigs but slightly slower.

In my opinion the difference was not significant but to some it might be.

But here are the things that I KNOW can minimize latency:

1) Hardwire PC network and FlexRadio network. Do not use WiFi on your PC. Use a good Gigabit switch with grounded net cables.

2) Hardwire speakers or headphones to FlexRadio. Do not use network (PC) audio. The latency increases substantially.

3) Hardwire mic and/or key direct to FlexRadio. Do not use network (PC) audio. The latency increases substantially.

4) If you use a Maestro, use it ONLY as the knob controller, not as your primary display. In this configuration your PC is running SmartSDR, the Maestro is in knob control mode.

5) Invest in a nice fast PC. I use nothing less than Core I7 with a minimum of 16G of RAM.

6) Use digital video from PC to your monitor. DisplayPort preferred or HDMI. These will provide the fastest screen updates.

Some here might question #4 and #5 but here is the deal. The small tablet PC in the Maestro is not going to perform as well as a fast laptop or desktop PC. If you are seeking ultimate performance for contesting you need to gain speed everywhere you can.

At our competing clubs field day a gent brought his Flex6300 and Maestro to use. The Maestro was on Wifi. While Field Day is not a serious contest the gent told me of something like 0.5 second audio latency on SSB. Over coffee we talked about the above points and he agreed they would have improved his experience.

Will a FlexRadio ever compete with say an Elecraft or Icom knob rig? Well it can come very close and you as the contester must decide if it is close enough and take into account the other features the flex has to offer in that decision.

For our field day this year we used a Flex6500 for all of our digital because it could monitor 4 bands of digital at once. So we could see when there were contacts to be made on other bands. Thats harder to do with non-flex rigs.