Or perhaps not

Just as I thought I was back on the Flex controller project I discovered a fault on the Flex radio itself. On 15m/12m/10m it was stone deaf. I'd noticed that I wasn't hearing signals on those bands but had put it down to poor conditions until I decided to do a A/B comparison with my FT5000 on 12m. After some excellent support, first from Martin Lynch and then from Flex itself, we identified that there is a problem with the amateur bands preselector/front end filter. So the radio's gone off to Flex's European support centre in Germany. I guess it'll be away for a week or so.

Meanwhile, the CPLD display arrived on the (quite quick!) slow boat from Hong Kong, so I've managed to get a bit of preparatory work done with the new display and updated drivers. It's all straightforward enough but there are quite a few changes associated with the new set-up, so it's probably just as well that I didn't get too far into the project before changing course.

I'm also working on the somewhat tedious but entirely necessary front panel layout. This starts off life as a drawing in Visio and will end up as an AutoCAD Exchange (*.dxf) file that the CNC milling machine can understand. Once it's let loose on the file, there's no going back, so measure twice, cut once is most definitely the order of the day!

I hope to have more interesting things to write about in the next couple of weeks.