Never mind the hype, how does it perform?

Picking up the thread from point 5 above (Enjoy) the one observation I have made above all others since I have set up the F5K is how little I have transmitted. This has nothing to do with any deficiency with the radio, quite the reverse; my enjoyment of listening to received signals has jumped markedly. I am sure that once the honeymoon is over I will resume more normal activities (for this station) and transmit a little more.

Heading straight down to the bottom of 20m, the CW is smoooth, I can't put my finger on it, it just sounds nice. Then there is the 10 band graphic equaliser that changes "nice" to "awesome". Even on my system, where I have PowerSDR running on a 15" TV/PC monitor with the F5K's audio ported to the same device the audio is without doubt some of the best I have ever heard. If I was running a better speaker, the quality would be remarkable.

[2009 update] I have now altered my shack and connected the Flex up to some high quality 50w speakers. BC is BC quality. SSB is BC quality when the transmitting station has good audio. Even the stations with crap audio sound better LOL.  As to CW, there can be no comparison, none of the high end radios I have owned before come anywhere near the quality of this.

Moving in for the kill...

One of the most impressive features of the F5K is its brick wall filters. Used in combination with the panadapter (RF Spectrum Scope) it is possible to click-tune to a CW signal that is right down in the noise - I am amazed that you can actually see such a weak signal on any kind of scope; it wold not have been possible on the ProIII which struggles to illustrate anything much below S3. The panadapter, if set up to focus on a narrower dynamic range will easily show S-zero CW signals but I digress. Although not directly accessible from the filter buttons on the "front panel" i.e. PSDR, the radio has tuneable filters which go right down to 10Hz. Yes I can see the rebuffs coming back, who would want a filter that narrow? It is true that at 10Hz the wall is not so much brick as kind of dry stone wall; still effective but maybe just losing the edge.

What is more important in respect of the above is not so much the width of the filter but that there is NO RING! I am not joking, hearing a 25Hz CW filter with no ring for the first time sent shivers down my spine! If you then bring in the graphic equaliser the CW is sooo sweeeet I cannot describe, it's almost edible!

So what about we sidebanders and ragchewers?

You are not left out of the equation, don't worry. The fidelity of phone audio is nonetheless impressive. With filters which can go to 10K wide, ESSB is truly amazing with almost FM quality reproduction. Indeed I was having a ragchew with a close friend recently and I recorded (directly from inside PowerSDR) the incoming transmission. Later we shifted to FM on 6m and I replayed that audio, Shaun's response was, "when did you record that, I thought I made that over in SSB but it sounds like BC FM.". . . . Smaller filter sizes are immediately available to seize upon should the adjacent channel begin to creep into your "field of hearing" so-to-speak. The 2.7K to 1.8K filters make selecting your signal from stronger adjacent ones a real cinch and with a filter width and I.F. shift available directly to mouse control in the spectrum display (panadapter) will make singling out even the hardest weak signal from amidst the cacophony of weekend contesters so easy it is silly.

For me, one of the biggest features of the F5K for SSB is it's customisable transmit audio profiles. One pane in the PSDR console changes with mode, i.e. it is mode specific and in SSB it brings forth a set of functions, some familiar and some not. You will find the anticipated mic gain, compressor and VOX sensitivity but there is also Compander and Gate. The compander algorithm is not fully implemented yet but it does work. It is intended to adjust how much gain is applied at low magnitude input and falls away as the magnitude of the audio input increases. One can look on it as a second compressor if you like.

The one I really like is the Gate! How many times have you been on the air and heard that station, obviously QRO but you can hear everything. I don't just mean every word, I mean every creek of the chair, rustle of paper, XYL watchng TV in the next room, hell I swear I can hear them blink sometimes... Well no more! Familiar to audiophiles and electric guitarists is the Gate which in simple terms for those that have never come across such a thing, is a squelch for your microphone. Need I say more? It has long been an issue with me that my own ambient noise level in the shack was too high. Ham radio has changed over the years and now most of us have at least one PC running all the time, often our radios, PSU's and QRO also have audible fans and all these things often find their way into your microphone unless you are lucky or work very hard to suppress it.

I was really chuffed with the Gate. Listening on a monitor radio as I ran QRO into a dummy load and adjusted the audio for my particular voice, then adjusted the gate, the difference is astounding. It is an audio illusion but it actually seems to reduce the QRM from the noise generators. Below a specified level the audio is cut off, killing all ambient noise. During pauses in speech, where high compression normally brings in the noisy fans and background, all this is silenced to absolute zero. As one begins to speak, the level exceeds the Gate threshold, which can be set below the VOX break-in and because one's voice is now at a much higher level than the ambient noise, the transmitted audio is more focussed on speech. Of course high noise spikes like the phone ringing, your XYL screaming "Dinner" and the likes will never be suppressed, without breaking the law ;o)

Has anyone developed an algorithm for an XYL noise cancellation function? (Apart from divorce).

Mentioned briefly previously in the text and again here for completeness, the TX has a graphic equaliser, just as the RX has. At this point in PowerSDR. one is restricted to selecting either a 3 band or 10 band equaliser for both RX and TX. Don't get me wrong, this is fantastic but sometimes I would like to have the RX on 3 band and the TX on 10 or vice versa which on PSDR v1.16.1.  is not possible. I know, cake and eat it...

Finally as briefly mentioned earlier, there are Transmit Profiles. There are a host of pre-programmed profiles set up in PSDR, like AM, Heil HC4-5, PR40+W2IHY and others. These settings are a record of all the factory-set TX audio settings and can be loaded, altered, saved and deleted at will from the setup dialogue. You can have as many or as few as you like and they are a dropdown away, even while transmitting.

Modes

The modes currently available from PowerSDR on the F5K are USB, LSB, DSB, CWL, CWU, FMn, AM, SAM (synchronous AM) DigiU, DigiL and DRM (now called Spec). It is worth pointing out that unlike with conventional radios where DRM involves rolling up your sleeves and removing the bottom of your radio and invading witha soldering iron, with the F5K only the third party software is needed to get going.

All of the modes benefit from the high quality audio found with the F5K (except DRM of course) and every mode can have it's own custom filters set up which is a tremendous boon if you are particular about your filter settings like me. There are 12 buttons factory set for each mode but on right-mouse-click takes you  into the filter configuration dialog where you can set the values of any of the 12 buttons with hi-cut and low-cut points which have VERY steep skirts. The text of the button is also customiseable.

Panadapter

The centre of the of the PSDR window is given over by default to the Panadapter, which as mentioned earlier is a spectrum scope. In true PSDR fashion, even this can be configured, with settings for colour and line thickness, and the number of times per second the screen refreshes. The latter is quite important as it can affect the CPU utilisation of the program quite substantially. Those with older and less powerful PC's can opt to slow the refresh down to reduce the CPU overhead. The panadapter is very sensitive and has four preset buttons for zoom, 0.5x, 1x, 2x and 4x. Granted you cannot zoom out to 2.5MHz like the FT-2000+DMU but then I never used that setting anyway. The Panadapter also comes with the obligatory Peak and Average settings to satiate those needs, and on a busy contest day, the Average/Peak is very handy as you can clearly see the gaps, which you can pounce on.

It doesn't end there though. The display mode has a drop-down which provides for Audio Spectrum, Oscilloscope, two Phase settings, a Histogram and an off, which can save some much needed CPU overhead for older PC's. In recent iterations of PSDR the screen can be split horizontally to have half Panadapter and half-waterfall for example.

DSP

For the DSP' heads among us, there are of course the digital niceties.

• NR. Noise reduction. This is very effective at killing the background hiss. It is intended to sample the audio stream and render a calculated composite of what it believes should be an intelligible signal while reducing the dross. Like all DSP NR, its use will depend on personal preference but its settings are configurable in a way that goes well beyond the FT-2000's 15 presets, none of which work very well.
• ANF. The auto-notch is pretty good. I have yet to find an ANF which competes with the ProIII but the beauty of SDR is its ability to evolve, so I wait patiently for evolution.
• NB. There are two noise blankers. Both of them are aimed at different types of noise and both have adjustable thresholds. I have found them to be very effective at my location. To date, for me, the Icom IC-7000 wins the NB contest with its adjustable threshold and noise pulse width setting. Hopefully this too will appear on PSDR in time.
• SR. Spur Reduction. This is aimed at reducing the visible and audible spurs which are artefacts of this architecture. Anyone with experience of digital spectrum analysers will be all to familiar with those ghosts.
• BIN. Binaural, which provides the I and Q outputs on the left and right channel of the speaker/headphone. I have not investigated this function sufficiently to comment on it save to say that it provides a three-dimensional quality to the signal which can be a little disconcerting at first but very pleasing to the ear on ESSB.

MultiRX

Like most good amateur transceivers, Flex have provided a sub-RX function. I must qualify that statement quickly by stating that this function is NOT a second receiver but it is a 2nd receive function. Icom ProIII users will be familiar with the Dual Watch concept which samples the I.F. to provide a tuneable sub-receive function by using the 2nd VFO. The limitations with the F5K are that the sub-RX frequency MUST fall within the sampling boundary. So if you are using the F5K with 192KHz sampling, the sub-RX can only tune a maximum of +/- 91KHz of your main RX (the balance is due to the architecture). If you have a sample rate of 48KHz, then the sub can only tune +/- 22.75KHz. Also you are restricted to the same mode to which the main RX is set to. Personally I do not find this a limitation for my modus operandi.

It is also important to say that at the time of writing (May 2008) FlexRadio have produced a 2nd, fully independent receiver to go into the F5K. This is a completely independent 2nd receiver, fully controllable from PowerSDR and can duplicate the main RX's capability.

That makes it the F5K the first amateur TRX with a quadruple RX capability!! I must say though that the 2nd RX is a few $$$$$!

[January 2009 update; I have now installed the 2nd RX and loving it!!]

The 2nd RX is a duplicate of the transceiver's main receiver and can take its signal input from a selection of Ant 1, RX1 Tap or dedicated RX2 input. This provides for a plethora of options, including diversity reception, monitoring other bands simultaneously, watching your own CQ frequency while quickly qsy'ing to a spotted DX, watching 10m or 6m for openings while working the lower bands, etc. With sufficient antenna separation, it will even continue receiving on another band while you TX on the transceiver. This option does bring hazards which one should be cognisant of before attempting.

VFO

The VFO functions are all familiar, there is nothing out of the ordinary to comment on.

Antenna Ports

All amateur rigs these days have more than 1 antenna port. The Flex has 3. Nothing much to write-home about there then eh? Wrong. Each antenna port can be set by band, and as the RX and TX path of the F5K are completely separate, you can select any combination of RX and TX antenna ports PER BAND.

There's more.

Actually you can also set drive power and maximum AGC gain PER BAND also....

And...

There are 3 RCA PTT connectors on the back of the F5K which can be set PER BAND.... This kind of functionality is well beyond anything found in a normal "state of the art" amateur transceiver... So I guess the likes of the IC-7800 and FTDX9000 aren't state of the art, but just toys like the rest ;o)

There is a heck of a lot more that I could say on this radio but frankly it you are that interested, you'll buy one to discover the other wonderful features that it has. It is also interesting waiting to see what will be implemented next. On that subject it is important to say that the development of PowerSDR is not down to the whims of FlexRadio, as a feature request and bug-report system also exist so if there is something you think the radio could and should do, you can ask for it publically. I don't know any other amateur manufacturer that makes itself so exposed.

Finally a word about the radio's deficiencies. Yes, like any system it is not perfect and one only needs to visit eHam to see any amateur radio product laid bare by the critics.

I have only three criticisms of the Flex-5000 after nine months of operating.

1. Top operate digital modes one needs to use a third party driver/application called Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) and it is shareware. Why oh why is this not shipped as licensed with the radio? Let's face it, most people who buy the F5K are likely to be digital enthusiasts so it is ludicrous not to have this functionality as standard. (More of a quibble than a complaint and plenty disagree with this one).
2. I live in a noisy QTH which has many carriers dotted throughout the amateur bands, and this causes innumerable spurs which if like me you rely on the Panadapter, can be quite misleading. More work on spur reduction, please! [Feb 2009, more work has been done and it's much better]
3. At the time of writing the F5K cannot operate cross-band from a transverter to HF and vice-versa. This means for example that I cannot work 6m/4m and I surmise that it is quite possible that satellite work might also be impossible for the same reason. [Feb 2009, at an unknown time in the last few months while I have very inactive, this functionality has been partly implemented; now I can TX on 4m and RX on 6m however the reverse is as yet, still not possible. For me this isn't a big problem as most of my cross-band contact are orientated the same way the Flex will cross-band however, it will still be frustrating for EU Flex'ers who are 4m wannabe's, wanting to RX on 4m and TX on 6.]
4. There is no ALC implementation for your amplifier. Since the whole subject of ALC and amps has recently become a hotly contested debate this too is not really a bad thing, it just means you need to check your limits and carefully stick to them.

In summary.

Aside of the four minor gripes above, I have reason to believe that this is the first time in 20+ years of ham radio that I am satisfied with a purchase. I have looked long and hard for a radio which fulfilled my specifications and finally I have found one. I feel settled with the F5K and excited by the prospects of what it can become in the years ahead. Whist sitting on some very rugged baseline specifications, the Flex-5000 has the potential to be so much more and I feel glad to be a member of the community which is going to experience first-hand this evolutionary process, which users of conventional radios will miss, analogous to sleeping through the next sunspot cycle. . .

I have no commercial interest or family ties with FlexRadio or any of its staff.

April 2009 Update.

Sometimes in life the unexpected comes along and snaps at one's heels. In my case it bit me on the arse. Finally settled happily with the F5K all was almost perfect in the rose garden of SDR. Then the proverbial greenfly came along. Long having operated with two GeForce 8800GTx video cards in the PC, the damn thing smoked and took the motherboard along with it. Turns out my video cards were drawing a lot more current than I thought they were (original data flawed) and the PSU was barely big enough to run the cards, let alone the rest of the PC.

Faced with another PC rebuild (which again put me off air, as with SDR, the PC IS the radio), and faced with some substantial video transcoding and rendering to do, I elected to rebuild on an i7 CPU. An entangled sequence of events then took place which culminated in my being forced to use Vista x64. . . Oh gosh. . . The decision was not made lightly, however, I kept running out of memory on the 32 bit O/S, which was no 'blummin' good to me at all. In order to use more than the 3.2GB limit that a 32 bit O/S provides, I had to go to 64 bit.

In the mean time, Flex had released a 64 bit driver only days before. I formatted a spare laptop and loaded V64 and tested the Flex. All seemed fine so I restored the lappy and proceeded to load up the new PC with x64. A nice PC, based around an i7 920, Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm mobo, 12GB RAM, 120GB SSD main drive and several TB of secondary storage. The PC OC'd on air cooling to 4GHz (2.66 stock!!!!). Wow wot a blistering machine. But ya know what they say. . . Pride comes before a fall and boy did I fall a long way.

The Flex ran smoothly with the new PC and newly-released driver. Trouble is, if you want to enjoy all the benefits the Flex brings, you need to make use of certain ancillary programs; virtual COM ports and-the-like. Although the Flex ran fine on V64, the virtual COM ports did not. Due to the driver signing polava on V64, only signed drivers can be used. Yes there are hacks, like running in Test Mode etc. but almost al of the providers of the 32 bit virtual serial ports could not provide a 64 bit equivalent due to Microsoft's policy of not allowing individuals to sign drivers - only corporations. I tried the only freeware x64 virtual serial port driver (com0com) but PowerSDR crashed in seconds no matter how I tried to make them co-exist. I would have to buy a commercial driver it seemed.

Then came the next whammy. In the furore of all the preceding nonsense, I had not quite finished loading up the new PC with all the required software; the vcom issue had seen to that. I proceeded to install the little application Ddutil, which if you are a digital ops person with a Flex, is an absolute must, as it provides a kind of COM port sharing/reflector service, allowing one to interface the Flex with one's linear amp, radio control, logging etc. Guess what. . . You got it, Ddutil refused to run on V64. I hurriedly and worriedly dispatched an email to the program's author, hoping he might have a fix. He did not. Ddutil would not function on V64 no matter what. It kept hanging during initial program load with a "Setting Up Timers" error message. As a non-programmer that was fatal to me. I could find nothing useful on the internet to solve the problem.

During all of this, time has passed and I am missing out on all the fun of being an amateur. Bit by bit the Flex was sapping away my enjoyment of the hobby. There is no doubt in my mind from the year of ownership of the F5K that it is the best amateur transceiver on the market. It is most regrettable however that the radio brings with it certain baggage which for some will create irreconcilable problems. By mid-April 2009 I had grown tired of the persistent niggles which surround the Flex; not the radio itself but the ancillaries. Operating a Flex-5000 station is rather like having a self-contained ecosystem; if one element is out of kilter it can throw the whole damn thing into disarray.

In the end I capitulated. Exhausted from frequent reformats of the PC which arose from trying to find applications which would provide alternative solutions to the service provided by Ddutil, I finally admitted defeat and was forced to make the decision I had been dreading might come. The Flex and me had to part company for sake of my sanity, my enjoyment of the hobby and ultimately the continuing 'good health' of the F5K.

Trading the Flex in for any other amateur rig on the market was trading down, however you choose to dress it. Faced with the question of which one do I choose as the Flex's successor I looked back over my radio owning history and of all the rigs I've had, the 756ProIII was the rig I most enjoyed operating (not counting the Flex, as nothing can compare). Against this backdrop and some general googling and digging, I almost went for an IC-7700 but frankly it's overpriced and was tempted by the Elecraft K3 as it had an after-market panadapter but frankly I thought that I would simply be inviting another "Greek Tragedy" as one correspondent called it. So I settled for the equally overpriced IC-7600. A few days into the ownership of the new radio I know I made the right choice. Already the fun and operating enjoyment has returned, although I am struggling a bit with my TX audio, I know I'll get it right in the coming days.

To sum up this saga.

If you are a 32 bit O/S person and you are not a PC power freak, if you don't have 20 applications running simultaneously on 4 monitors like the twit who is writing this, I can only recommend the Flex-5000. There is no other equipment, amateur or top-end commercial like it. The TX audio, when carefully set is the best there is. The RX selectivity, when set up correctly is the best there is. The radio will evolve and I simply cannot express just how superior this thing is to the likes of the FT-2000 or "top end radios". BUT. If you have a Vista 64 PC you are immersing yourself in a world of hurt unless you are just going to 'operate and log' without need of digi-modes and linear amp band switching etc. You cannot just come into the shack and 'ham' around while waiting for the PC to boot - the PC is the radio.

Like I've already said. The Fkex-5000 is the best there is BUT it has baggage, be very sure it's not too heavy for you to carry like it was for me.

73tu

Nige.

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