After a long wait, we finally received our sample of the Flex 6500 this Wednesday. This was purchased as a replacement of our 756 Pro III as it has reached 10 years of use, and therefore will be put to use as our HF-radio number 2.

The package included a quick start guide, a CD for the SmartSDR software, a power and Ethernet cable and a FHM-2 microphone.
Flex 6500 radio

We hooked it up to our Windows computer, and except for some minor issues connecting it to our local network, it seemed to work well.

The radio comes supplied with the software package SmartSDR which includes the SDR software itself, a virtual CAT port manager and a virtual audio stream manager.
The SDR software can be a little hard to set-up, but we were able to figure out how to operate the radio surprisingly quickly after the initial startup-procedure. The virtual CAT- and audiostream-software also seem to work nicely.

The 6500 can listen to four different parts of the spectrum at the same time, a function which can be quite useful when monitoring several competitions at the same time.

SmartSDR- four bands concurrently

We have not explored all the options this quite advanced software defined radio can give us, but we will hopefully be setting this up properly in the not so distant future. Our initial impression of this radio is good,  so we expect this to be a good replacement for our trusty 756ProIII.

73 de LB0VG