Does flex 6500 provided 8 dax channels

Ray G6UJB · September 2015

Does the flex 6500 provide all 8 channels to DAX ?

I know you can only select 4 slices/dax at any time, but when I select channels 5 to 8 on SmartSDR 1.4.16 nothing changes on the DAX control it stays on the last channel selected if it was 1 to 4.

I have a feeling that when I first received the 6500 I could chose any 4 channels from any of the 8 DAX channels, or am I miss remembering?

Thanks in advance.

George KF2T · September 2015

Yes, you can run 8 channels of DAX, which is more than the number of slices. I use them as default settings for various programs (for example, DAX1 for WSJT-X, DAX2 for FlDigi, DAX3 for WSJT-10, etc., so I'm not having to adjust all the time. Of course, this doesn't work simultaneously. Only four.

Ray G6UJB · September 2015

Hi George, thanks for the feedback. That's a little worrying that I only seem to be able to use the 4 channels, hopefully this is not a hardware issue. I wonder if any one else has experienced this?

Robert -- N5IKD · September 2015

Many people disable the upper DAX channels so that they do not show up in programs that cannot list that many sound devices. Is it possible that you previously disabled the upper channels? (Just shooting in the dark)

Ray G6UJB · September 2015

Hi Robert, Thanks for the thought, but No unfortunately, I did think this so I've just tried doing a clean re-install of SmartSDR and as far as windows "Sound" tools is concerned all the playback and Record DAX channels are enabled.

Mike NN9DD · September 2015

The software has the capacity to have 8 but the radio only has 4 slices so only use 4 can be used at once.

This does however make one want to wonder if you could get two or more DAX channels on the same slice? The thought around this would be to decode PSK 31 PSK 63 and PSK 125 at the same time through different software packages. There is one or two contests that could be helpful.

Would not be widely used but its a thought.

Mike
N9DFD

Ray G6UJB · September 2015

Well I've tried reinstalling the SmartSDR 1.4.16 S/W and carried out a factory reset of the 6500, disabled the PC firewall but I still cannot get the DAX control to see channels selected from 5 to 8. All the DAX channels are enabled on the Windows Sound control and the default and default communication flags are set on the laptop microphone ... This is starting to worry me now.

George KF2T · September 2015

No, you can't have multiple DAX channels on a slice, but you can have multiple slices (each with their own DAX) on a single frequency or band.
I've used that to "head to head" compare two packages with the same signal set.

George KF2T · September 2015

Ray - I think you've hit something. I went and tried to reproduce your situation and was completely able to -- something seems to have changed.

I used to be able to access all 8 DAX channels as described (I used Ch 8 for Skype very happily).

Now, though, I can select them in the DAX Control Panel, they turn yellow but attempting to select a slice doesn't go above DAX4.

Interesting!

Tim?

Ray G6UJB · September 2015

George, Many thanks for giving that a go and that's very interesting, I'm sort of relieved and not at the same time if you know what I mean that its not just me (sorry).

Hope I haven't over stepped the mark, but I've raised a helpdesk ticket to see what comes back from the support team. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again for your kind assistance.

Robert -- N5IKD · September 2015

Sounds like this could turn into a feature request.

Steve-N5AC · September 2015

DAX channels are 1:1 with slice receivers. But you can have multiple computers, each running the DAX control panel, that listen to the same channels. For example, you could run RTTY decoders on multiple computers -- say MMTTY on computer A and 2-tone on computer B, each listening to the same DAX channel(s).