Notes from Underground

Today I received a note from a buddy who received his F3K yesterday. He is running a laptop and the plug between his laptop and his flex didn't mate. The laptop uses a 4 pin and the F3K uses 6 pins. So I advised a 4 pin to 6 pin cable. These are very commonly used to mate firewire video cameras to computers.

He wrote back and said the install was uneventful once he got the cable and he was impressed at how well he was hearing weak signals on 20M. I wanted to just say a word about how easy it was for him to get his new radio up and running. I hope to I can have him write a little more about his initial experience so I can publish it for you all.

I later received a note from a ham who stopped by for the shuttle launch this week. and when he found out I lived here is shuttle country he dropped me a note. He is a retired communications engineer who was showing his grandson the shuttle up close. It is spectacular to see the launch up close. You can see it from a couple hundred miles away, but when its up close the experience is entirely different, just the noise is deafening

Any way he is a F5K owner and his big thing was how his radio is basically a collection of test equipment for him (as well as a damn good radio). In other words the "linearity of the S meter and its dBm readout and the panadapter and its use as a narrow band signal analyzer etc etc. He is also enjoying playing around with the various SVN threads including the diversity thread I have written about. He is both amazed and jazzed to see what happens when he plays various antennas one against the other in the diversity setting.

So I wanted to take a few minutes to relay some of their experiences so you all know I'm not the only one having a total gas (anesthesiologist joke) with my flex experience

73