Goodbye 6300, hello 8400!

Well, time flies, and I see my last post was 11 years ago when I got my Flex 6300 radio. Scary. A lot has happened since then, some personal, and of course work, fun and some travel. Another reason for not updating the site is I somehow lost all access to my wordpress blog, and it took me ages to get around to reinstating it.

So what have I been up to… Let’s start with my new Flex 8400, which shows how much I love Flex and my old 6300. I just felt it was time for an updated model, but to be fair, the 6300 lacked nothing, and I was sad to see it go in PX with ML&S. I decided not to have the internal ATU at this time, as my end fed long wire (inverted L) is attached to an LDG external tuner, and my A3S is resonant on it’s 3 bands (when not having problems) . Being a glutton for punishment, I also decided to update to the latest HRD paid version, and to run my database off a network hard drive running Maria DB so I can use the radio from different rooms around the house. All good in theory, but I ground to a halt getting Maria DB and HRD to play ball until David Higgs G4NVB & Martin Higgs M9MKC kindly came to my rescue with a beautifully put together “How to” guide, and I was up and running. Since getting that up and running in February, there has been some lovely DX around, and I’ve managed to work Austral Islands, Bouvet Island, Central Kiribati, Bangladesh, Benin, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Desecheo Island, Haiti, Sable Island and a few others.

Next on my list is to upgrade my Yaesu rotator so I can connect it to my computer. The flex can now be powered up remotely via an app on my phone, so in theory I can use it anywhere- but I haven’t tried it yet!