Integration III

Today is a red letter day! My controller has moved 8ft to the right along my desk. Not in itself a big deal but in so doing it has also moved out of my software development lab and into my operational station. And that is a big deal!

The G3WGV Flex Controller is on the left, FT5000 centre stage
and logging PC on the right.
Lurking in the background the KPA500 is just visible

Close up of the two contenders. Which one will win?

Firstly I had to make up a bunch of cables. Suddenly I need two more Ethernet cables up that end of the room and, of course there's all the usual stuff to connect the Flex 6000 in with the rest of the shack. I'm rather pleased that I was able to simply parallel up the FT5000 and Flex radio audio outputs, so I can swap between them with ease and QSOs on both rigs will be properly recorded by StarLog. The Tx enable on my KPA500 linear similarly seems to be quite happy to be paralleled up.

Of course it wasn't all plain sailing. I found that StarLog would happily work with either the Flex 6000 or with the FT5000 but not both. A few coding tweaks and that was resolved. I also chickened out of trying to use a single paddle for both rigs, so I've brought my old Bencher out of retirement to be the paddles for the Flex rig. Depending on how things go the MagPad and the Bencher may get swapped around before too long!

So this is an important day. I shall now be able to start using my controller for making QSOs. I'm quite sure this will yield all manner of ideas for improvements. You'll get to hear about it here. Now I am off to play radio!