Dear FLEX-1500 customer: FlexRadio is pleased to announce that the FLEX-1500 is now shipping in volume in the US and EU. While there have been requests to publicize where we are in the shipping queue, we do not plan to do so since such effort would detract from shipping radios. Each radio will ship from backlog based on pre-order date. The first two production runs are sold out and were informed today that our EU vendors sold their entire stock in the first day of HAMRADIO in Friedrichshafen, Germany. The third production run is scheduled to begin mid July. If all goes well, we expect to complete shipment of the first production run over the next week and the second run over the two following weeks.
The primary reason for delayed shipment of the FLEX-1500 has been unexpected USB driver problems that prevented satisfactory internal CW keyer performance. To meet the low latency and jitter requirements for CW, we purchased a widely used USB driver development kit that allowed us to write a custom driver. The custom driver provides very low keying jitter and low latency side tone. Unfortunately, we found a bug in the vendor’s development kit that prevents reliable operation with the audio portion of custom driver. FlexRadio expended considerable time and resources in identifying the bug to the third-party took kit vendor. A radio has been shipped to the vendor to aid in diagnosing the problem. Rather than further delay shipment until the vendor’s bug is fixed, we have combined our custom USB control interface with standard USB audio drivers. The software drivers provided on CDs shipped with radios this week allow operation on voice, data, external keyer, and keyboard CW modes. Over the weekend, we plan to provide a software update for download from our website that adds the internal keyer upgrade. This functionality has been vetted in the lab and by our beta testers but was not ready in time to burn CDs for shipment with the radios this week. We are preparing a Knowledge Base article that will aid users in optimizing performance on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 systems. If you have a choice of operating system for the FLEX-1500, we recommend Windows 7 because of its superior WASAPI low latency sound interface. For that reason, Windows 7 is much more plug-and-play for the FLEX-1500 than the other two operating systems. The FLEX-1500 uses an early deployment version of PowerSDR™ 2.0 that is not yet a public release for the FLEX-5000 and FLEX-3000 users. Those customers should continue to use PowerSDR 1.18.6 or PowerSDR Beta 2.0, depending on their preference. Now that the FLEX-1500 development is wrapping up, we expect to apply software resources to complete bug fixes and allow the official release of PowerSDR 2.0 for all platforms. Please monitor the www.flex-radio.com website and the FlexRadio email reflectors for the latest software and information updates. Once again, we at FlexRadio thank you for your pre-orders and your patience while we prepared the product for shipment. 73s and enjoy, Gerald Gerald Youngblood, K5SDR President and CEO FlexRadio Systems(TM) 13091 Pond Springs Road, #250 Austin, TX 78729 Phone: 512-535-4713 Ext. 202 Email: [email protected] Web: www.flex-radio.com Tune In Excitement (TM) PowerSDR(TM) is a trademark of FlexRadio Systems _______________________________________________ Flexedge mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexedge_flex-radio.biz This is the FlexRadio Systems e-mail Reflector called FlexEdge. It is used for posting topics related to SDR software development and experimentalist who are using alpha and beta versions of the software.
