8600 Delivery/LANs and range extenders

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