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Nov 4, 2022Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

I look forward to your impressions of the QDX!

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Nov 5, 2022Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

I've been on the road, but when I got home the night before last the QDX kit was waiting for me. Also waiting for me was the "inovato Quadra" tiny linux box that Steve mentioned in a previous ZR, so I'm going to test the two together. I've got Direwolf running on the Quadra, which is supposed to be in the same league as a RPi-3. Also waiting for me was a bunch of other stuff, including a new Pick-and-Place machine, my new spectrum analyzer, and a big assortment of components, so I'm having a hard time focusing! Too many projects! But I will report back on the QDX ASAP.

And Steve, thank you for making me seem articulate.

-Paul / wb6cxc

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Tom:

I'm certainly a fan of the QDX, and share WB6CXC's enthusiasm for it. As I'll write about in a near-future issue of Zero Retries, I'm juggling too many interesting projects and I'm going to have to prioritize on a few to get a few of them completed.

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Nov 4, 2022Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

This article rally describes a very similar path that FlexRadio took with the USAF. The USAF was looking to make the same kinds of modernization upgrades that the Army is and they held an Industry Day where they explained their needs. FlexRadio went with a partner (Raytheon at the time) who was really required because FlexRadio is small enough that it would be difficult to meet all the USG FAR contracting needs and everything the USAF needed on the contract. We competed against numerous other vendors, won a contract to supply the Air Force with a modernized radio and designed the radio base on the FLEX-6000.

The thing I found interesting about your article is that we did just what you're suggesting. While we were tasked with basically putting a FLEX-6600 into an airborne chassis, making it work with aerospace environmental and adding modernized waveforms, we looked at the radio we were replacing (a Collins radio known as the ARC-190) and noticed that it had been produced for 40 years. Knowing whatever we build might need to last that long, we put a tremendous amount of CPU horsepower into the unit, expansion slots, modular design, additional receiver, etc. to allow for growth over time.

The Air Force ran a competition between us (Raytheon/FlexRadio) and L3Harris and, due in part to our design which didn't just "meet the minimums," but provided tremendous capability for the future, we won the competition over L3Harris. In short, a radio designed by a US Amateur Radio company with <50 employees was selected over one designed by L3Harris with 30dB more employees.

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Steve - Thanks for discussing those details of FlexRadio's USAF contract. I attended the FlexRadio banquet at Hamvention 2022 and thus was aware of FlexRadio winning the USAF ARC-190 replacement, but I didn't want to mention that project by name because not enough of the Amateur Radio / military contract crossover were available for cross-checking my statements as fact. (At the time I wrote that article, I wasn't aware of this YouTube video - https://youtu.be/OY0La6PuMQw. Although that new Army contract was the genesis of that article, the knowledge of what FlexRadio accomplished was certainly in mind in making a case that Amateur Radio experience can be a powerful "secret weapon" for future US government / military contracts for new radio systems. I look forward to the "future systems" that you hinted about at the end of the YouTube video.

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Nov 6, 2022Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

nice read tonight, quick idea for a charging station: Grab a deep cycle marine battery or other equivalent, grab a battery box for the battery, a size up would be really nice but one the size of works as well. Hop over to amazon and search 'usb panel mount charger' and grab (almost) any that strike your fancy. Some are better than others, most of them throw off some amount of RFI. You could grab one or two cigarette adapters to mount as well. I would grab switches as well so you can turn them off when not in use. install everything in the lid of the battery box, might want a set of power poles as well and a bunch of fuses. once its all back together you can trickle charge the battery with a battery tender and then charge upto x devices at once! (for a more pro look grab some wood and make a stand that phones can stand in that you can put on a table to make sure the phones don't drop on the floor or anything.

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Nov 8, 2022Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

I like the idea of providing neighbors with a connection in an outage. I did that, ad hoc, many years ago when I had my DSL connection on a ridiculously oversized UPS during a long power outage after an ice storm (cellular was intermittent). Something like the long range ubiquiti APs do actually have some directionality, and that may useful so that you can cover some extra distance in a particular direction -such as down a road, as people may be sitting in their cars to use it. I also like the idea of creating an "emergency" SSID and VLAN with bandwidth restrictions. Such a thing could even stay up, with a major bandwidth restriction, to let people try it ahead of time.

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Nov 8, 2022Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Some measurements on my just-built QDX (on my blog): http://wb6cxc.com/?p=244

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