Tech

My Flex 6400- Box full of mysteries

Dan Romanchik, KB6NU . On reddit, /u/Food_B posted: Do you know your radio ? This is just another question because I’m curious. Your favorite radio(s), I’m curious, do you actually know them backwards and forwards, all the mysterious settings, all the features? Or, is it still unexplored, are there still settings deep in the manuals that you don’t understand yet, things that it does that you haven’t tried yet? How well do you know your radio, is it like a well worn pair of shoes, or more of a box of mysteries and new surprises? The responses ranged from “I always read the manuals thoroughly and need to know what my gear is capable of” to “I know my radio fairly well, but there are things that I haven’t used yet due to other station limitations or needs.” My take on this is more along the lines of this commenter: I’d say I know my [radio] pretty well at this point, although every once in a while I’ll find something new and interesting. I liken this experience to using a complicated piece of software, like Microsoft Word (I actually use Libre Office) or Excel. I usually just jump in and start using it, and only when I want it to do something that I haven’t done before, do I dig out the docs and try to figure out how to do it. Recently, for example, I wanted to decode some RTTY during a contest, so I found a few forum posts on how to set up fldigi with the Flex 6400 and learned how to do it. There was some talk about the usefulness (or uselessness) of manuals. I think that most manuals are pretty good at describing how the various features work. What they’re lacking, however, are case studies for when and how to use the features. For example, the Flex 6400 manual describes what feature to use to pipe audio to a third-party application, such as fldigi, but it doesn’t really give you the compete picture on how to do it. YouTube videos and blog posts fill in that gap. Finally, there was this comment: There’s the old joke: Q-code: QNB? How many buttons does your radio have? QNB 83/16. My radio has 83 buttons and I know what 16 of them do. I love it. :)