I had similar results in the recent WWDX CW contest, using the F1.5K at 5W! about 30 countries! About 4 hours of operating.....I didn't keep score as I was out to work new countries with QRP.
With the F1.5K, I used CWX exclusively for the exchanges...worked great! The brick wall filtering on the F1.5K was darn good too! The little receiver is beyond belief. Yes, I experienced CW delays with the paddle, so used CWX instead. George K2CM ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, December 12, 2011 1:35 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [FlexEdge] ARRL 10m CW with Flex-5000 All, I thought I would share my experience this weekend in the ARRL 10m contest using a Flex-5000. This is my first semi-serious contest effort using the Flex-5K. I operated in the Single-Op CW HP category using the Flex-5000, PowerSDR v2.2.3 and the N1MM logger. Keying the 5K was done through the CAT port via N1MM and directly with a paddle connected to the back of the radio (no external keyer). The Flex-5K was driving a Henry 4K-Ultra (8877) at 50w to make 1.5KW. This was a part time effort in between putting up Christmas lights and decorations, all-in-all 17 hours of operating time. So, the question is - Is the Flex5K + PowerSDR ready for prime time CW contesting? Here are some interesting stats from my effort: Total Q's = 1129 Mults = 143 Est. Score = 645,788 Best sustained rate over a period greater than 60 minutes 145Qs/hour or 2.4 Qs per minute . Best burst rate over 10 minute period 240 Qs/hour or 4 Qs per minute. You can't do these rates if there are serious issues with the delays in the system! I had the audio sampling rate set to 48K with a buffer of 512. The DSP buffers were set to 256 on TX and 2048 on RX. There were a few times when the TX/RX change over caused my to miss the first part of the first character, but this was rare. The brick-wall filter skirts definitely earned their keep. Also, being able to grab the mouse and fine tune the filter bandpass, both edges and centering, helped a great deal. One thing you notice with a Flex-5K is just how many really crappy signals are on the band. I won't list calls (I did keep notes), but there were a few standouts in the worst signal on the band category where their clicks were only 10db down from the peak and filling 50+ Kcs. Others were barely recognizable as a CW signal on the spectrum display. One recurring issue I still have to figure out is that there was some key stroke my clumsy fingers made that turned on the multi-RX features. This caused me to think that someone QSY'd on top of my run frequency when they hadn't. I finally was clued in by looking at the spectrum display and saw it wasn't correlated with what I was hearing. Then I saw the multi-rx button highlighted. This was the only somewhat annoying thing experienced with the Flex all weekend, and it is attributable to op error. I consider myself a fair CW operator and I can certainly say from my point of view the Flex5K+PowerSDR are certainly ready for prime time CW contesting. I love this radio!! All the best for the holidays. Cheers, Chuck de NJ6D (aka N7KU in the contest) _______________________________________________ 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 beta versions of the software. _______________________________________________ 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 beta versions of the software.
