The Ham Radio two point zero Audio podcast rip. Thank you for downloading and
listening to this podcast. So basically what I do is I take all the
audio clips out of my videos and upload them to spreaker and then from there
they're spread out to iTunes and SoundCloud and now Amazon Audible as well. But
I want to welcome you and thank you for joining the audio section of this
series on Ham Radio. I hope you enjoy it, and I would appreciate
you leaving us a comment or review on whatever podcast service you're listening from.
Thank you. In seventy three hope you enjoy it, and it did is
seven oh one in Texas, So good evening to everyone, and thank you
for tuning in tonight Sunday Night live stream. We're gonna be talking about Flex
Radio smart Link tonight, something that I really enjoy and something that makes our
connection in Costa Rica possible when the Internet is up, which is not Flex
Radio's fault that the Internet in Costa Rica goes down a lot. Just want
to make that clear, But yeah, we are. We have a really
cool setup down there when it's online. So yes, Larry and Ted are
talking about ten meters has been open all day. I was looking at that
right before the stream twenty meter ft eight right now is literally red on the
bandscope, red on the waterfall. Usually it's like green, maybe yellow,
maybe some orange in there with strong signals. Every now and then it is
freaking red right now, so that means really strong. So it's really fun
looking. So we're gonna take some look at that special Shout out to the
YouTube channel members out there. I see AC three, I K out there,
Z L one h O g Ham Radio Crusaders in the house. Who
else is out there? Let's see saw smoke signals RF. Thank you Don
KR five EEE Randall one of my all star buddies, say c KB eight
d x N, So thank you for being out there today. Thank you
for your support of the channel. Speaking of winning, gray men, Poda.
Since you're asking what did I win, You didn't win anything. You
just you You get the honor of being here tonight. So how's that.
But here's the thing. So I made this announcement a week or two ago,
last week maybe something like that. I've got roughly roughly about eighteen thousand
people on my email list. It was about seventeen to five last week and
I've been sending out tweets about it on Twitter or x dot com, whatever
the heck they're calling it now, and on Facebook and on Instagram with these
places, and I've got I've gained a few subscribers over the last two or
three thank you, Frank, two or three weeks something like that. Frank
just shared the link in the chat. When I get to twenty thousand email
subscribers, we're gonna do a giveaway of an HF radio, maybe a Flex
radio, but probably not. Probably something a little bit a little bit less
expensive than of Flex radio, but we'll see. Maybe maybe I don't know.
I haven't decided yet, but it will be a giveaway of an HF
radio once I get to twenty thousand, and it will be given away to
one of the twenty thousand email subscribers. So you have to be subscribed to
that email list that Frank just shared the link to in the chat, So
you have to be subscribed there. Once we reach twenty thousand, we're gonna
announce what it is and a date for it and whatnot and blah blah blah
and go from there. So yeah, building my email list that way.
Thank you for those of you who have subscribed, and I hope I don't
bug you too much. I try to send it out an email earlier today
about this stream tonight with some discounts and coupons on it, and I try
to send usually two a week, one before my Sunday live stream and then
one other during the week, sometimes on Wednesday if I live stream, or
sometimes on Friday if I have sales and coupons that I've heard about set that
kind of thing. So yeah, so that's what's going on there. All
right, let's go ahead and kick this off real quick because I've got a
couple of guys in the chat here that I know want to talk to you
guys, So let us bring that over and that over. Good evening.
Michael and Eric from Flex Radio. How are you guys doing tonight? Wonderful?
Eric, go ahead, I mean, Michael, you first, you've
been on the show before. I haven't been on the show before. Yeah,
it's great for Sunday night. I didn't know you did Sunday night shows.
But thanks for having us, and uh, a little bit short notice
a good thing. I read my emails yesterday and so this will be great.
Yeah, we had traded some emails earlier in the week about something unrelated
and then he said, Hey, we want to talk about smart Link,
and I'm like, that's great, But I didn't see that email till like,
I think it was late Friday night, but I was out on Friday
and or I was driving home from from an event on I think I emailed
you either late Friday night or Saturday morning, I remember which one it was.
And I was like, I know it's short notice, but you want
to talk about it like tomorrow. So thanks for being here, guys.
Eric, what's going on with you? Man? How are you tonight?
I'm doing great. Thanks, You're good. So, yeah, people are
gonna want to know Frank's already talked about this behind the scenes, but what's
in your background because people are going to wonder about that. Well, this
is just a zoom background, so it gets just generated much conversation, but
I imagine just a fun background. Okay, good, Well, thank you
for being here tonight. Appreciate you guys taking the time out tonight to talk
about flex Radio. So Frank, I'll go ahead and let you give you
a thirty seconds or so. How are you? I'm doing all right,
y'all. What's going on? How did you all the tankers out there in
the chat? I've said hello to many of y'all already. Also, I'm
kind of getting close to four thousand subscribers. That's pretty awesome, right,
Yeah, yeah, for sure, I'm forgetting there. I'll go ahead and
just drop the link in there. If y'all want to help me out and
go ahead and subscribe to tank Radio, that will be amazing. And I
think that's mostly going on for me tonight. Good Okay, Well, thanks
for sharing the links in the chat. Frank is going to be watching the
chat for questions. We've got his number of questions. We're gonna go over
with Michael and Eric from Flex. So yeah, that's kind of a talk
that I think they've done before given maybe given it dayton in the past,
and uh, we're going to talk about that with them tonight. But if
if questions come up during the chat, you know you guys, feel free
to pop them in there. So all about smart link. So for those
who don't know, I'm gonna give you my definition of smart link because I've
talked about this on the show before and I've done videos about it before.
Smart link is basically a way to connect to your Flex radio remotely. It's
very easy to connect to your Flex radio with the smartest of your software when
you're on a local area network in other words, plugged into your home network
or if you have one running at your ec plugged into your EOC network via
Wi Fi via ethernet, very easy to connect to any radio. You just
opened smart SDR and it totally and it automatically finds any Flex radio equipment that's
on your local area network. But if you leave and go elsewhere, how
do you connect to it? And the answer to that is smart Link.
So we're going to talk about some smart link stuff tonight. And Michael,
I'll go ahead and let you take it because you're the one who sent me
this list of questions, which I really do appreciate, and we'll read them
as we go. But I know that you've done some of this before,
so please feel free to kick us off. Okay, And what was the
first question? Because I don't have an open that's all right, I've got
it right here, Okay. So the first question was can you provide an
overview of what smart link is and how it benefits Flex radio users? Which
I did in my words, But I'd like to hear what your words are.
So yeah, no, no problem. I think you did the executive
somewhere around that really wonderfully. Smart Link is a tool that was developed by
Flex Radio to well, let's art with the problem. The problem was using
HF RA or any radio remotely. But since we're an HF radio company from
one hundred and sixty three to six meters or even some transporter work, how
do you connect to that radio if it's across the street or half a world
away. And okay, so all the network geeky guys up there goes no
problem, I got this fixed. We'll just do a VPN, we'll do
some port forwards, we'll have dindy ands and all this stuff going to work
great. But that's not most HAM operators today. So Eric and Steve and
the team, she's almost ten years ago, I guess now. Eric came
up with SmartLink. It was a vision to how can we make this work
so it's easy for any HAM operator and it's performance is good and meaning that
we're not going through servers in the middle all the time, And how do
we set it up and make it secure and safe? There is the lessing
that we joke ABOUTZ we don't want to read in the top you know QST
today that my radio got hacked by some guy in some other country and and
and so that's why we have a lot of security among it. But you
don't need to worry about that. We do. And so the smart link
is smart Link is the tool we use today to connect remotely. Now,
I've been operating remote since two thousand and five and in the Flex world,
you know, since they released this in version two of smart SDR and never
looked back and shive a few hiccups now and then it generally just works and
it's as good as the internet you're hooked up to, as you just said,
Jason, right, So in your costa week station and I run a
full contest station using the smart link tool, you know, an so O
to our contest station, single operator to radio using smart Link. And the
goal was to make it just make it easy to do, which I know
I've said a couple of times, and so that's what that's what it is.
If you didn't see my talk Dayton where I discuss how different vendors do
remote then I go into detail on each iconcam with Yasu allcraft in ways that
you can, and Flex Radio of course connect remotely. Now that didn't get
published by the Daton team, so I will rerecord it and get it out
and Jason, you're welcome to share it on your list. When I get
it recorded, and I try to make that vendor agnostic, it ends up
being a little Flex favored, but the facts go that way anyway. So
anyway, but keep in mind, I say this all the time. I'm
a HAM operator. First, they just let me come to work every day
and play with this stuff, so you know, so I'm on the air
a lot. Eric, anything you want to add to that, No,
I think you covered it well. I think one key part about it that
the users really appreciate is the fact that once you're logged in on SmartLink,
it really operates very similarly similarly than what you do locally. So it's the
operation is full featured, and it's it's just easy to use because you're familiar
with that interface already. Great, and it's a peer to peer connection.
There's no server in the middle, right, so it's as fast as you
can make it. And that's if you're not familiar with that term, just
file that one on the back of your head. So it's simplex. It's
simple. People should be familiar with the term simplex not having to go through
a cell tower. So yeah, peer to peer basically means simplex over the
network. Good, okay, Well, question ahead. There's one more thing,
so that means I take the client the part I use, whether it's
a Maestro PC, a Mac, an iPhone, is directly connected to the
to my radio and for peeks out there, I sit at home. My
turnaround time is about thirty milliseconds round trip time. That's okay, which is
pretty normal. Yeah, there's some hiccups in there, but prett yeah's pretast
gamers would be happy. Next question, yeah, well, the next the
second question kind of I mean you kind of answered already what inspired the development
a smart link? And how has it evolved since its inception? So maybe
the second part, how has it evolved since it was first released? That's
a probably good one. I'll defer to Eric on that one. By the
way, ericson a VP you're a founding member of Flex Radio and he's a
VPN in software, right, is it? I was all accurate? Go
ahead, Eric, i'lllet you answer the next one. Good, Yeah,
how has it developed over time? Honestly, it really hasn't changed much since
its inception. I went back today to get some dates, and I think
we released version two back in twenty seventeen, and the basic infrastructure there has
not changed since we launched it. So there have been some minor tweaks here
and there, but no major thing. So yeah, architecturally and fairly sound
okay, good, Well that's good. I mean, yeah, it's it's
it basically, so I have said for a long time. I was like,
you know, it's the cool thing about One of the cool things about
sex Radio is that if you were to go in with a group of hams
club or just you know, get two or three or four friends together something
like that, and pick the guy who's got the best home QTH and the
best tower setup and best antenna set up at home, and the three or
four of you go in and buy a radio together. Sixty six hundred preferred,
I think, but buy a radio together, pull your money and buy
a radio together. You can go download smart SDR for free. Smartest DR
for Windows is free. You can go download it right now, install it
in your computer for free. There's no licensing if you don't have anything to
connect to, it's not gonna do much for you. But if you guys
went in, if like a hand radio club or something went in and they
pulled the money bought it radio, then all of you could connect to it
from your home qth or from your iPad or whatever. The iPad software is
made by help Me with the name Marcus d Right Marcus, and he makes
a mac os software and an iOS software and he does a really good job.
But he charges for that because the open API, which we'll we'll talk
about her in a second. But but anybody can go download smartest your for
Windows for free and install it and work from home, and smart link is
built into that system and is also free. That it doesn't there's no charge
for any of the Windows software that Flecks Radio makes. So I've always thought
that was a really cool system to be able to do that, because you
know, it's it's perfect for him radio clubs and whatnot. There isn't a
week goes by that we don't hear about somebody's moving into an apartment but his
buddy's lending him his radio, or even as we get older, where they've
taken an iPad into somebody who's shut in. Yeah, and let him get
back on the air when he never thought he could again, you know that
sort of thing, And a lot of that's happening, right, And yeah,
it's a bunch of other cool things like you can use it for teaching
and mentoring. But the sharing, you know, can you imagine the look
in some guy's face when he hears his little cronies on eighty meters on a
Sunday night has a whole new list of meds he can talk about, right,
yeah, yeah, yeah, they can go in there and talk about
their their their hospice care and colonoscopes and whatever. So yeah, oh boy,
eighty you said eighty meters. I didn't bring that up, you did,
so yeah, okay, good deal. Yeah, but yeah, flex
flex Radio, smart SDR and smart link all built into the to the whole
system. So you touched on this a minute ago, Michael. But security
is a significant concern for remote access and how does smartly ensure the security of
users and radio data? So I'm going to defer that to Eric. I'm
going to use three letters TLS, which is an industry standard technology. Use
it on your bank cards and everything else. But Eric I'm sure that was
an early conversation, right, cont do it. Obviously, security is important
in any friends acts like this, but we really wanted to ensure that people
would be able to trust that if we made their radio available to them remotely
and made that easy, that it wasn't going to be something they'd have to
worry about that that other people would be able to access in appropriately. So
we've used all of this standard industry standard protocols. So TLS is used in
the connection process to the server. The server actually acts and we covered this
briefly before, but it acts as a broker. So the smart link service
sits in the middle. You go talk to the service and it kind of
arbitrates the connection between the client and the radio, and then it gets out
of the way, and that connection to the radio at that point with the
TLS connection is abou as secure as you can be on the Internet today.
So somebody's asking, what is it TLS version one dot three? Yes?
Good, I don't know about versions, but that was a question in the
chat, So good, okay, perfect, awesome, Okay, So this
one number four is a question that was a really good question. But this
is a video that I put on the channel like three or four years ago.
So the answer to this question is in a video that I already made,
but we'll talk about it tonight. I got a lot more subscribers than
I had back then, so a lot of people probably haven't seen this video.
But could you walk us through the process of setting up smart link for
remote operation, especially for users who might not have extensive networking knowledge. Right,
Well, the first thing you'll do is that you know you need your
radio and you're going to set it up. And if you're new to it,
we actually tell people who are building a remote system to play with it
at home first and then take it to the remote. And if you've ever
run a repeater in your lifetime, you know exactly what I mean. You
want to save those trips to the remote site. I know in your case,
Jason, you get to jump on an airplane. But yeah, so
you'll set it up and and the land in the Hamshack and Dan and seven
HQ, who works with us, has a great video on the land in
the Hamshack has become quite a tool in hand radio world today. It used
to be the antennas were a big deal. Well, computers and land and
radio and now they're all part of the same big deal. And so you
unbox the radio, you hook up an antenna plug in twelve vaults. You
hook it up to the plug a land cable into the back of it,
and download the software and start it up and then like you said, it'll
find the radio and away you go. Well, the smart link requires a
couple of extra steps you need to build. We've got this documented in Sadly,
I know exactly which section of the manual is, which is section nine.
But it's very very cool how they did it. You come up with
a username and a password and register yourself just like an email addressed type of
thing, and then a couple of more steps, it will automatically send a
couple of commits to your router using Universal plug and play. Okay, I
can hear that other network guys going, you know, Universal plug and play
is evil. He could be evil, but it's never been really an issue
in this point. But it's about to say, I was going to watch
the comments come in on that one. For you people, you can do
this manually and set up your own ports and whatever, so we won't go
there. But for most people of the typical home network they've got, you
know, somebody's router and some Wi Fi and stuff. It should just work
right out of the box. Smart Link is a whole other issue, or
smart link starlink startling start. We won't go there because of a whole different
type of technology. But for traditional cable fiber DSL Internet, it generally just
works as required. I haven't tried it on my starlink yet. Is there
is there a non issue with that? You better buy the business version you
need. They use something called carrier grade NEAT and essentially you're double netted.
Going into details, but so you've created a user, I d log in
the radio, sends a couple of commands called universal plug and play commands to
the rutter to open two ports and back to itself the radio. And then
also it sends that that same information to the smart link server and says,
hey Mike via three MW, this is this outside wayan address, and here's
the two parts he's using, and we just file that. As Eric said,
in a broker or like a telephone book, look up and when I
log in remotely now, But actually one more step to do then to make
sure you actually own the radio, you have to do one more step,
and it says hit the push to talk. See the first time, you
have to be right beside the radio, Okay, and the same thing.
To d register, you have to hit the push to talk because god forbid
we'd have somebody sort of log into Jason's radio and steal it away. Right,
So you hit the push to talker the CWKE mocks or some physical button
you have to push, and then you're done. So now you take.
The first thing you do is you're going to go to Starbucks or McDonald's with
your iPad and see if you can call home and if it works great and
if not, it could be a couple of things. But this is where
we have support staff that work for us that you can call. They're the
best at the world of this stuff, and we'll help you with it as
well. I mean, your support guys are pretty good and also HAM operators
and on the air all the time as well. So I think, again
I'm going to defer to Eric, because I know Eric's my perfectionist in this.
That I missed anything obvious, No, I think the only thing I
would mentioned is that the first thing they would usually direct you to from support
would be there's a built in network task. Oh right, that networks It
will kind of give you a pass fail. Are you good to go?
Or is there some kind of a port forward or something that needs to be
addressed? And sometimes that can be helpful to address then when you're setting it
up as opposed to when you're out and about and trying to connect. Right,
Yeah, you do want to do the green LED. Well, it's
not really an LED, it's just a dot on the screen, but we're
talking about kind of connections and things you need to kind of have here.
There's a question from the chat from Jason. Will this work over V six
IPv six IPv six? It really depends. So the short answer is the
radio today does not support IPv six, but it still works in some circumstances
when a cell phone network, say, is operating an IPv six, depending
on how they've implemented their fallback to IPv four. So it's kind of a
your mileage may vary. I know in Europe there are some places where IPv
six is very prevalent. They don't have as much of the fallback infrastructure that
we have over here because they've been very successful in their rollout and they've had
more trouble in those situations. But yeah, So the short answer is it
really depends on how they've implemented things. And long term, we know we'll
need to support IPD six all the way to the radio and that will address
that issue long term. Thank you from Digital rnswer. How much bandwidth do
you need for a set for a session if you want good audio quality,
that's a good question. The it depends. But if you're thrifty and we
have ways to make it thrifty, you can easily get down to a boat
and this is the edge of about two hundred and fifty to three hundred kilobits.
But what consumes a lot of the bandwidth. That's an upstream, by
the way, so you know you're now a server, so you're sending data
out and you can consume. You can drive that all the way up well
over a meg to make and a half. But because your screen is a
waterfall and a pan adapter, if you change those refresh rates and make them
you know, instead of once a second to I don't know what's the highest
number, sixteen frames a second. You know you it's a movie, right,
it just consumes a lot more data. So when I first started remote
operating here, I only had one mag upload. It's I'm in a rural
area, and so the first thing I had to do was get in or
if you had, you know, any change, was to slide those rates
and frames per second numbers all the way to zero, which was still wasn't
bad even if the waterfall only updated once or twice a second, still an
amazing amount of information. So those things will vary your upstream load. But
going down to zero drops it down actually almost sub two hundred and fifty kilobits.
So and we there, sorry, go ahead, no, go ahead.
I was just going to say, we have an option too. It's
called low bandwidth connection that kind of defaults all of the defaults to a single
pan adapter, single display, and lower frame rates to kind of help that.
Because one thing we noticed was if people were used to operating in a
higher speed environment and then they tried to connect and there were you know,
two or more panted apters open and the connection couldn't handle it. Sometimes it
would time out before they could even get in to go change those settings.
So some people will have more success connecting with that low bandwidth option, and
then you can kind of tailor it the way you want it. I've I
had success with a low bandwidth. Mostly I was just listening. But I've
carried and i'ven't done this in a while, but I've carried my Maestro in
my truck, connected through my hot spot on my phone and connected back to
the radio right behind me here, just to kind of like listen to nets
or listen for someone because you can't, just because I can't. Yeah.
Yeah, when I first got the Maestro, that's exactly why I did it.
I was like, why not? You know, my inten at home
is a heck of a lot taller than the one I had on the truck
at the time. So so we have a lot of customers that drive for
a living and they either use an iPad and if they're driving a big truck,
but exactly what we said, they have room to put the Maestro on
a mount right there and they love it. Yeah, since you said iPad,
what platforms is this available other than a computer? Is it open on
all computer platforms or is this also a mobile solution? Okay, insert Michael's
speech about the open API right here, so go. So right now it's
Windows, iOS and Mac. So the next question is what about Android and
what about Linux? And I don't know what about chromebo. That was asked
by Ted, and I was kind of steering into I'm going to give you
the lecture I given them. But I think Eric's probably in alignment with us
and the generally we have an open application programming interface and with the iOS we've
had several vendors with that Apple we have several people Marcus and another guy,
Don V three VRW both developed applications in the Apple environment totally on their own.
We have reached out Rattle chains ass people and the Android and Linux for
all, going hey, why don't you build a client? We are I'm
going to be blunt. We're not going to do it. You know,
it's not on the roadmap now. Who knows what five years might bring.
But if you want it today, you'll have to do it yourself. Happy
to help you. And Eric gets a lot of those emails you know,
how do I how do I do this? And and I just sort of
tongue in cheek saying I don't think there's any Ham operators who are Linux programmers
that are on HS that have just gotten to the point where they want to
write their own for Linux or you know Chromebook for that matter. I'm going
to defer again to Eric, but that's we'd love them, right, we'd
love someone to start bringing that at Eric. Yeah, that's accurate. We
we would be happy to help support some folks that want to run with that
project. The email address to reach out to is dev help at flex radio
dot com. We'd be happy to help anybody that wants to head down that
road. And and on the Flex Radio YouTube channel is a great video about
how to communicate with the radio, how to start building the APR just sending
it plain. You just telling that into the radio and you type in a
command and it says, oh, there's there's the health of the radio and
it comes back in English. And this is why guys like a number of
us have done such great things with node red, because we're not programmers at
all, but we can hack something together. And we've come up with USA
little solutions type of thing using node red. And because a lot of HAM
operators are you know, logical enough thinkers to to figure out how that worked.
And that's all all my station control is now. And yeah, but
the dev helps great, I know, I said Eric, and somebody always
answers, and it's easy to even. You know, if you're a wire
shark person, you can go stick wire shark on the channel. Okay,
if I turn the VFO, what happens, Well, there's the command and
here's everything coming back and Eric again it diffirms since we're here my correct in
thing sort of the pan adapter waterfall is nothing more than a movie. We're
sending frames of pictures that of thing. Yeah, that's accurate. So it's
you know, how often do you want to send them? And there's also
the aspect of how much data are you sending. So if you're on a
four K screen and you make it full screen, we do our best to
give you full resolution of the paned after and waterfall data that obviously takes more
bamwidth than if you shrink that down to you know, maybe a thousand pixels
wide or something like that. So ah, that's proportional. But yeah,
you can still even I think our default is something like fifteen frames, and
I think you can go up to I don't know, I think it's full
year fifty frames per second. But you can still get very reasonable data from
the band at much lower frame rates if you know bandwidth is a good center.
And it was just just to clarify you're you're saying if you sift the
traffic between the wireless or not wireless, well it is a wireless or there's
a eat the nut for on the flex head and to the Flex radio you
can see all the commands and answers, but back and forth in the clear.
Yes, and so I should qualify when you're connected on SmartLink because the
connection is through TLS, it's encrypted, so that makes it tougher. But
when your local on the local area network, you can look at that and
like Mike said, it's uh, you know, human readable. It's very
plain text. It's it's easy to debug and it's easy to kind of gather
what's going on based on the TCP traffic going back and forth to the radio
from the client. Good. Yeah, Kyle appeared in the chat when we
started talking Node rid Yeah. So all right. So yeah, so that's
that's all really good information. I think it's important to say that Flex Radio
writes smart SDR for Windows. Everything else that's available now was written by someone
in the customer community. So like the mac os and the iOS, so
someone needs to write the Android now I'm sort of somewhat kind of a little
bit kind of you know, sort of working on that on the back end
with with someone which you know who, you guys know who it is.
But once we get operating privileges in MAYHKO, then it's possible. I'm going
to take my radio down there and leave it for him to do that because
he wants to that. So that's the that's the goal right now. Yeah,
that's the goal. It gives me an excuse to buy a sixty six
hundred for here, so I'll take my sixty four hundred down there. But
I don't know, we'll see, but yeah, so hopefully Android client will
be coming soon. But yeah, that's it. Just no one in the
community's written one yet, so that's why. Okay, so this kind of
leads into this what types of Flex radio, what types of Flex radio radios
and software versions are compatible with smart Link and are there any hardware requirements for
users? So all of six thousand series, so sixty three hundred, sixty
four hundred and sixty five, sixty six sixty seven, and let's just put
this in. I'm going to put the sales hat on for a minute.
You buy a sixty three hundred and sixty five sixty seven all came out about
twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. So if you were to find a used one
and buy one of those, you know what you have. You still have
a brand new radio today, a radio that's right. And I, the
ham operator me is saying, you can't do that with a radio I bought
ten years ago. When you bought it, it sort of stuck in time.
So they're very future proof. And people call me all the time,
and I say, if you're a budget person trying to put in a radio,
try to find a use remotely, try to find a use sixty three
hundred and stick it there and you'll be happy. It'll be great work,
wonderful. So your question is, and then which version of software? It
was released in? Version two dot one? But yeah, yeah, something
like that. The the uh no, I see now, I can't remember
on the top of my head. We're up to on version two dot is
two dot ten dot one on the version two software, and on version three
it's three dot five dot nine. And if you buy a new radio today
for Ernie or even a pre loved radio from US, you get version three.
You can still run version two if you want to, and if you're
at version two and decide you want to upgrade for the features that are in
version three, then it's one hundred and ninety nine dollars. Ultimately there'll be
a version four. What price that will be, who knows, depends what
comes in it. But it's still a lot cheaper than do you remember the
Icon seven fifty six Pro one, Pro two, Pro three? Ask me
how many new one of those? I bought each one? Yeah, yeah,
yeah, And so that's that means just pretty much anything available today now
the fifteen hundred, three thousand, five thousand, or it's the first one,
which was the one thousand. No, you can make it. He
really creative. You could probably use them remotely, but it's not the same
type of thing, so we won't even go there. Yeah, yeah,
anything six thousand with the six thousand, six thousand, yep, yeah,
six thousand series. So that's great, cool, and they're not as expensive
as you think. I think I used sixty three hundred use Marcus somewhere south
of fifteen hundred dollars. Yeah, yeah, I believe that's right. I
mean, you know, you get Yahoo's on there that want twelve hundred dollars
for a used Icy seven thousand, So you're gonna find that for flexes.
But yeah, you can find them for reasonably reasonable prices if you just keep
an eye out ham Fest swap swap forms at qr Z. So yeah,
I've seen him for twelve to fourteen something like that for sixty three hundred,
So that's good. Cool. Uh Okay, So this one might be a
little bit, this might be a rabbit hole, but we'll go ahead and
put this with this question number six on your list, Mike, can you
share some success stories or examples of how smart Link has improved the remote operating
experience for him radio enthusiasts. You kind of touched on that in the beginning
with people in retirement homes and whatnot, but if you have anything further on
that you'd like to add, well, that's certainly a good one. We're
also seeing the expeditions that they may or may not use smart Link, but
they use the technology. So we've seen a couple of those even this year
with George, and I apologize I can't remember George's call signed with the RIB
where he takes a couple of sixty seven hundreds and drops him on an island
and they all in an air conditioned boat. Or he had operators all over
the world running the last d exhibition. He had a three weeks ago type
of thing. They enhanced things a little bit, but I think I did
touch on that and or exactly as you said. You know, one guy's
moving into apartments. Some guys got a farm. They build their own little
club and they find it works out really well. And with a feature that's
in version three called multiflex, two people can use the same radio at the
same time you sort of argue over the transmitter, but type of thing.
So that's really cool. And so yeah, I think you're getting the point
now where you can you know, we're not stuck in the basement anymore,
you know, operating or the back forty or as a kid, I grew
up in a crawl space, Aglow. I'll tell you at seventeen, I
was happy to be in the crawl space where the adults couldn't get in.
But yeah, I just think the land, I guess back to the little
land on the hamshack has just made this so dynamic and so you can you
can build what works for you and uh and how it works good, good,
excellent. Okay. Uh, let's see all right, So we're going
to get into some of the questions now that that I've been wanting to talk
about in the UH and then there was an email about this yesterday and the
event of server maintenance or updates. How do I ensure minimal disruption to smart
link users? Okay, I'll take that one, and then I think the
next one is probably Eric, but okay, so we generally we we've had
a couple of outages over the last four years and uh and they're painful,
painful for us, and uh we I guess if people weren't weren't coming and
reaching out to this, we we wouldn't think it was being used. But
of course it's it's quite a powerful and useful tool. Uh. So we're
working on that process and procedure where we have a we have a downtime coming
up on Tuesday at three central UH twenty one hundred zulu where we're going to
change over to a brand new smart Link server, whole new design and everything.
And I'll let Eric talk a bit about that at some point in time.
And so expected downtime of well, we booked a window of about four
hours. I think it'll be a lot less, but you know, if
you work an it just never goes that way all the time. And so
how do we notify people? Well, the last oditage I've I generally used
the Facebook. Two Facebook groups we have the face Flex Radio page and the
Flex Radio Enthusiast page. I used x do we have to say formally known
as Twitter all the time? Now I just still call it Twitter. Okay,
it sounds dumb, Sorry, it just does well. And then I
xed everybody there we go and the community certainly is always a good place to
go. And I was a by on vacation. Sort of worked it well
for me. But Erica had some updates on that about you know, we're
making progress and sometimes if we don't update it the next day, it means
nothing's changed and doesn't mean we've forgotten about it by any means. And and
then we found a cool tool in our web server and web server tools,
so it actually if you go to www dot FlexRadio dot com now it'll just
pop up right away and say, hey, there's an outage plan and I'll
change that. You know, if there's Tuesday, hopefully it will go away
and we won't have to have that again. So that's how we'll notify it.
And then I found some email groups and I jumped on and told them
too. So I'm on the Flex Radio email list reflector whatever you guys call,
and that's how I got notified about it. I got an email directly
from Flex Radio saying, hey, fyis that's my big mailing list. That's
true. I emailed our worldwide mailing LISTE and the same thing. I stay
on that because that's an excellent list to be on. If you're looking to
buy a Flex Radio and you want to wait for the Black Friday or the
end of the year sales or the Daytonham Mention sales, that's where that's where
you get all that information about or are going. So it's the first Monday
of the week sale, you know. Sometimes we have we're we've always got
something we're trying to Yeah, we're new equipment coming out, you know,
when the the new Maestro that was announced a few months back. Whenever it's
finally ready, I'm sure there'll be an email sent out of it. When
we're all done, i'll talk about the Maestro. I saw a couple of
things in the chat. Yeah, yeah, I've got a Maestra on order,
guys, So Michael and I are going to get back on the channel
once I get a new Maestro in my hands. So fingers crossed on now
one. I have to make sure I get one right, right, hopefully
you'll get one for me. I don't know, all right, Uh okay,
So next to so question number eight, how is Flex Radio dealing with
the recent outage? I know that there's been some smart Link outages. Now
it's important to say that this doesn't keep you from using your radio at home.
You can always use a radio at home with your local area network unless
you have a power outage internet outage yourself. And even if in an Internet
outage, you could use the M series that has a built in screen.
I guess you could probably use a Maestro with some kind of finagally. But
this is for a smart link. So recent outages for smart Link, I
think is what you meant with that question, Mike, So you guys go
ahead and take that one, Eric, So yeah, I guess. Back
on September eleventh, around noon, we started geting reports that people were having
trouble connecting through SmartLink, and as we began investigating that we found that one
of the Route CAA certificates had expired and this was causing the secure connection via
TLS to fail. So if all that meant nothing to you, that basically
just means some of the infrastructure that is required to keep things secure as time
time stamps on it so that they don't last for forever, so that when
we say we're Flex Radio and this is our server and that kind of thing,
it verifies that. And there are companies upstream from us that we buy
a certificate from that they kind of rubber standard. They actually go and verify
the stuff and say, yes, this is a legit company, Yes this
is where their server is, and they issue certificates that enable all that connection
to be secure like that. So one of those certificates in that chain expired,
which is relatively unusual for the FA to expire before the sert itself,
so that one caught us by surprise. We've had certificate expiration issues in the
past and because of those we were on a path. In fact, we
were in the process of updating the cert when the Route THEA certificate expired,
and we actually stopped that process to go investigate why SmartLink wasn't working, so
that enabled us to update the server fairly quickly. The kind of the bottom
line on that whole issue, we have a number of systems out there now
still running older software that failed the connection, and that's really bogging down the
older server that's that's running. As we talked about, the infrastructure has been
the same since we launched back in twenty seventeen, and as you can imagine,
we've sold a few radios since then. So kind of bottom line on
all of that was we were in a situation and still are where the existing
server is just being overwhelmed. Okay, So is that what steps are being
taken to? I mean, are you going to put build new certain new
bigger Robus servers, or put more servers online, or you know, launch
a bunch of satellites like Elon musks. What's the probably not so hold on
that's your question. Nine Oh okay, okay, rolls right into it.
Then, Yeah, so what have we done to day? So we've done
a bunch of optimizations on the existing server to see, you know, how
how can we keep this going and bring people back online? That was our
primary objective initially. Uh, And the servers are back online. They have
been. They are overloaded, which means at times you're going to have a
harder time connecting, which means it takes longer to log in and that kind
of thing. We're monitoring that situation closely and we do what we can to
keep those servers going. They're actually a pair of servers, and when one
system gets overloaded, we can load balance to the other one, slopping those
resources. So that would cause users to have that would cause users to have
to re log in, right, yeah, correct, So that's a painful
process and we don't want to do that more than we have to, and
we're balancing that with the idea that we want people to be able to access
their radios remotely. So that's been the situation since we had to release new
software to cover that additional certificate that we updated because the old one had expired.
But kind of the bottom line is that's kind of a stopgap measure on
the existing server. The downtime that we have scheduled for Tuesday is so that
we can roll out new server infrastructure. And I use the term server loosely.
It's more than just kind of one box now, it's actually a whole
infrastructure it's a server cluster with a load balancer on the front and a database
back end, and all of that is a more modern architecture. It's been
architected to handle both current and future load. And we've been testing this out
internally for Actually don't I should have looked at the dates beforehand, but well,
well over a couple of weeks and we release it to our alpha team
before last weekend and all that testing has gone really well, so we're confident
this is going to be helpful. They bring us back to a place where
people don't really think about it. It's just when they use SmartLink, they
click on it and it works. I have a question for Eric because I
think question tends he covered both of it. But yeah, Eric, we've
had a number of users, and I think he can answer this better than
I. Reporting that when SmartLink was not its normal self, they were hearing
a little bit more audio artifact as I probably, I think because the radio
was trying to log in and it was And can you elaborate a bit on
that. Sure. Yeah, there's several things we've learned in this process,
and I expect at some point we'll have a full written report that will put
out on our website that will have the whole technical here's what happened, and
things like that. But some of the things that we learned. One when
the server when the certificate went down and we couldn't connect, we couldn't authenticate
properly from the radio. Several patterns emerged where the radio didn't have good back
off algorithms when it was trying to connect, so rather than you know,
trying it and then realizing there was a problem and trying it again later,
it would just keep trying over and over kind of thing. And that pattern
was true both on the radio and the client. The fact that we hadn't
found that to this point is actually a testimony to the uptime for the the
smartlingk service. But nevertheless, it was a poor design and needs to be
improved. We actually have some of those things in process now, but the
load balanc around the new server is expected to handle all of the current load
even with those designs in place, So we'll be improving those things in future
software as we can come up with them. Those really those kind of issues
we don't want to rush through. We want to take our time and test
those well so that we can cover all the different corner cases to ensure they're
going to work well in all kinds of different situations and not cause other problems.
The last thing we want to do is cause more problems addressing others.
Yeah, well, I mean it sounds like it sounds like a big growing
pains issue, which is actually kind of a good problem to have. I
mean that there's a lot of people buying the system and more people logging onto
the server. So I mean, obviously you don't you still don't want that
to happen. But you know, it's not that it's not that something has
failed. It's just that you guys have a lot of customers, which is,
you know, a good thing. I think so because it's such a
great it's a great system, it really is. You know, we got
a lot of I got a lot of emails. Many of them were thanks
for letting us know. I guess you know what happens, and and I
think, Frank, you know, you realize you know what happens with certificates
and stuff, right because I'm smiling in the background, you know, because
some employee ten years ago went I'm not saying this is what happened here,
but yeah it did. In a previous some employees. It all grabbed that
put it on my credit card and he's long since left the company. You
know, these things happen and how its most companies, and I don't know
that's that's probably not your case, but a lot of I think it was
at Google there was a big name company that had a certain expire and the
whole website went down because whoever was managing that left and no one knew about
it. I think starlink had the same outage the next night when things start
falling apart, just after zero zero zero Zulu and I've watched those guys on
Reddit. And then so the next night, which I think was Tuesday,
I'm watching starlink on Reddit and I'm always watching network things. It's like I'm
offline. I'm offline, and I'm wondering if something similar to that. Of
course, they're never going to say, right right. I did have a
question here from the chat. You're talking about capacity load balance. The Brian's
asked, will the new server have a ditional capacity to handle high use high
use times like during major contest weekends. So the short answer is yes.
The the remember too, in our conversation earlier the server is actually out of
the loop once you're connected to the radio, so it's just a broker.
But yes, we certainly do see a spike and server use during contest times.
And the new infrastructure that we're rolling out uh is actually scalable, so
we'll have the ability to roll it up to a larger uh, you know,
more servers in the cluster, larger cluster, that kind of thing,
if we need to do that, and we can automate all of that.
So the is the load balancer that's on the front end is set to handle
you know, many tens of thousands of connections per second. So if we
get to a point where we have more than that number of radios that are
needing to be connected per second, then we'll have a whole different set of
problems. Okay, we're at the end of our questions, Frank, and
I know you've been copying down some questions from the chat, so go ahead.
Yeah. I've been interjecting some of them as they made sense for conversations.
But the ones that I did stack up here are from my smoke and
cigar brother, don Izzo. Can you please expand on multi use multi user
at the same time option. I'm new to this topic. Oh multi flex,
yeah, I can take that. So the radio is I try to
avoid computer terms, but there are something that makes sense. The radio is
a server. Okay, it's like a web server. It's just a radio
server and actually uses some radio technology called bit of forty nine. Not that
that matters. So this multiflex just allows two users, like two users logging
into a Raspberry pie a type of thing, to use the same information at
the same time. The cool thing about a flex radio and software defined radio,
by the way, so I do a lot of club presentations. So
I take the words software defined radio and think of it as just a manufacturing
the next phase of manufacturing. You know, we started in radios. They
were spark gap and then there were tubes, and then there were semiconductors and
integrated circuits and things got smaller, and now we're at software defined where we
do a lot of the work in things like a field programmable Gatoray, so
I'll take a liberty here. When we take RF energy in from the antenna,
the first thing we do is we chop it up and make it look
like numbers, and we do that at sixteen bits. Little SDR dongles do
eight bits, some other radios do fourteen. Does it at sixteen And if
you want a number you can probably understand. You can zoom into a signal
right down to the single pixel and it's four hertz wide of radio spectrum roughly.
This is pretty you know, there's a lot of cool data there if
you really want to. And as well, a flex radio takes the entire
radio spectrum HF radio spectrum from thirty killer heerts to fifty four magahertz one hundred
percent of the time and turns it into these numbers that we can do something
with. And to give you an idea of how what was the number Steve
and I came up with. It's about three hundred and forty Raspberry pies probably
pie fours, running in parallel, you know, in sort of horsepower,
okay, and then the little network inside is moving three gigabits of data.
Well, that number doesn't sound big. Most of our home networks are a
hundred megabit and someone is her fully gig so three gigabit data streams. So
this allows two users to connect to a radio. You know, in theory,
you could have more. I guess if the if the if the radio
could support them all or had the enough energy or power to build all the
screens and everything. But so I could be on eighty meters and you could
connect to my radio, and as long as the antenna supports it, you
could be on six meters. So that's uh, that's what multiflex is about.
Now, if I want to talk on eighty I'll just hit the push
to talk switch and as long as the other guy isn't talking, I can
get on the air. Now he's gonna hear me and his his conversation may
or may not be muted. And this is a bit more of the power
of the radio with a full duplex feature type of thing. But we have
a couple of guys that I know personally that two guys get on every day
for their am net on eighty meters in the morning. He's the same radio
and they're even on the same frequency, you know. So uh, it's
we've got to get our head out of especially for a fart hands like me,
that my radio only deals with three killer herts a signal and that's all
it ever sees that anyone given time. Well that those days are over.
Okay, we see fifty four mega almost fifty three mega herts of band pass
at the same time, and you can zoom out, you know, you
can zoom out to eight megaherts wide on a big screen and you'll wonder why
the noise floor sort of tapers up and down, And it's because of the
It may be because of the queue of your antenna, the performance of your
antenna where it's good and where it's less good. You know, there's all
sorts of cool things you can see. You can watch if you've ever worked
on a waterfall, you can see the on a SAD signals. I hope
I pronounced that correctly, where they sweep the spectrum. They have a transmitting
site here in a big receiving site halfway across the country. They use it
for understanding if the band's open. So you see them coming and you go,
actually, there goes one right now in twenty just happen to see it
run by, and you know, just so, that's what multiplex is all
about. Awesome, awesome good. We'll try this question from Mark. Seeing
that remote hand radio uses flex radios, would I be able to connect to
their to their different radios via smart link or remote ham Radio needs to have
smartly installed at their different stations. Excellent question. Remote hand Radio is a
business r HR. They sell airtime on HF radios. Another love it or
hate it? I think their model is great again for people getting on the
air that now may have you know, had to give up there. You
know, they've moved into an apartment they can afford it. Uh, it's
it's been a very good business. They use all our radio equipment, amplifiers
and everything. They have their own. Actually, Eric can probably answer this
better. They don't use SmartLink. They do everything by web browser or maestros.
Eric, But so you don't need to worry about it. They do
the wrong thing. But they've very smart people there. They're they're we've met
them. They're great people too. So yeah, yeah, I've tried to
get them come on the show a couple of times. They're just really busy.
So one of these days we'll do a live stream with them. So
you can lean in here, let me know, I want to hear it.
Yeah. Well, I spoke to him at the QSO today Ham Expo
virtual thing last year and he seemed interested. We just never have been able
to connect since then. That's okay, I have the same problem. Yeah,
okay, him and Ray. But they're great, they're one on one.
They're wonderful people. I've talked to Lee Moore on the air. Actually,
oh really, I don't think I have his call signed. But okay,
okay, Frank, what's next? Oh this is from unseasoned Ham Radio.
What is the flex preferred solution for smart link and on a CG net
connection. Yeah, that's starlink. It could be starlink, It could be
a couple of other smaller I spend. We talked about it earlier. And
the reason why I asked this question, I don't think we really covered on
how to do that or is the answer is it is not really supported?
As it's not really it's certainly not supported. I have a white paper I
wrote on the site. Let me get the link and I'll just drop it
in our chat and you can paste it through happily do that for you.
Sure, okay on my description. But essentially to make it work, you
really need to run through an intermediate server to broker all the communications because you
can only call out from each and start to call on the radio. But
there are like starlink you can get me like a proxy service you'd have to
run a proxy in the middle. Yeah, okay, that'll increase your latency.
I see Eric shaking his head. Yes, he said the right words.
Yeah, believing we would love a Starlink solution. There's you know,
it's yeah, that's weird. I haven't actually tried my Maestro and my sterlink
yet, so that's disappointing to hear that. It's no, no is fine.
Oh, it's okay. So what's the radio radio end? It's the
radio? Oh when the radio is on starlink. I was about to bring
that up. Is it which end is on stark? Is it the radio
or is it your remote connection using starlink? Okay, yeah, it's the
radio end. So if you have your radio at home on a normal old
ISP, you're fine. Yeah. Now there are a lot of guys playing
with it. Go to our community community dot flex radio dot com and search.
There's a bunch of guys have had some various success. Some seem to
be getting Wan addresses and not on a business account, and they've got some
other ideas as well. So interesting. Okay, I'm trying to find my
white paper. It's it's worth mentioning here that our engineering team is always thinking
about these kind of problems. How do we allow more people to use their
radio and more, you know, different kinds of situation. And we know
we can't cover all of them because there's just too many different kinds. But
as some of these things like sieging that and other kinds of IPB six is
a good example, as technology has become more common, we're looking at different
ways of how we can support those and so we're always thinking about those things.
I can't promise that, you know, here's the version that will have
a solution that's good for all of that, but we understand there are people
that need to use those technologies and we want to be able to enable that
as best we can. So stay tuned. Yeah, good, Okay,
all right, Frank spamming the chat. Yeah, there we go. Oh
that message is greater than two hundred characters. There we go one last time.
Blah blah blah. Sorry I was posting that. I have some comments
here from Sean or Shane. This is the perfect conversation. I'm looking into
this. Thank you very much. From Ken to be to care for someone
by turning on the station, Oh, he says, be careful, someone
will turn your station onto a number station, but they can't. Yeah,
yeah, no, they only only authorized users. And if you want to
turn to a number station you will. Uh. Here, here's kind of
a fun couple of questions from Scott. What is a good starter flex radio?
Uh six M And if you want to learn more about it, just
call us. I'll even you know, go to the website. Phone us.
We actually talk on the phone to customers. If we don't answer the
phone, we're just busy generally, and we do get some. Man,
I'd love to publish some of the voicemails we get. It's like, you
know, you guys are playing cards when we're working DX actually but right,
yeah, work in DX and sometimes we are actually at work in DX.
But yeah, if you do leave a message, it goes to multiple people.
We do call you back. So yeah, we can tell you about
stories about answering the phone. We worked at BlackBerry. There were some notable
ones because we worked the light stift. It's a great movie. It's a
great movie. I just watched it the other day. I haven't seen that
yet. I have the book, but I haven't seen that yet. So
I'm looking forward to watching that. Cool. Okay, Uh, Frank anything
else. I've I caught a couple here. Stephen asked, okay, Mark
asked one thing, and that's going to be a longer answer, I think.
Steven asked, will smart link ever be a charge service when more in
the future, when more users come on, Eric, It's certainly something that
we'll have to continue to evaluate. We we've enjoyed being able to provide it,
you know, with the radio to date, as costs increase, and
as for example, in order to do something like what we talked about to
solve the carrier grade NAT problem and to be able to transport all of the
data between every you know, client and radio. In that case, you're
no longer just a broker. You're actually handling all that traffic. Ah.
We've priced out something that would handle something like that, and we we would
have to charge for something like that. So to the degree that we want
to offer services like that, those will be things that we'll have to consider
in our business plan. Uh, there's no current plan to charge for smartling
today, but as as we've seen, things can change in the environment.
So I guess that's the the wishy washy answer. An economic I can get
Yeah, and the economics of it. It's actually funded by the retail price
of the radio. Mm hmm. Money has to come from somewhere, right,
So yeah, okay, uh, Frank, anything else? I have
a comment here from the happy Ham says, I had to say the Flex
customer service is bar none, top notch. They are always gone above and
beyond it and are always able to answer questions. So yeah, I saw
when he said that. I highlighted it on the video. So yes,
agreed, agreed, So I am looking for good comments. I think that's
about it here. Okay, you want to do my maestro pitch? Yes,
yes, yeah, okay, I want to hear that. Okay,
So if Eric wants to hear it too, so the Maestro see, I
guess we're gonna call it. Yeah, it seems to have stuck, so
you know, always subject to change. Yes, it is alive and working
well. We are well into the almost jump into manufacturing a whole pile in
a hurry type of thing. The target to start shipping the backlog of huge
back order list is supposed to be. It's probably going to stretch out a
bit, but hopefully by year end. I'm gonna it's supposed to be earlier
in that, but hopefully we'll over deliver it, but there's there's always hiccups
and either manufacturing or you know, if one knob doesn't show up, you
can't ship it type of thing, right, Just all it thinks is a
two cent piece, right, although the car industry seemed to have gotten around
with that. Yeah, we didn't ship you your seat heaters. Yeah,
well you don't want to be MFG. So I actually got that from Stubs
one time. I was talked to him and he was faking for I was
like, dude, that's all you. Anyway, you want to make sure
you subscribe to the Flex Insider, which we send out once a month.
Go to the web page. It's www dot Flex Radio dot com slash Insider,
bottom right of the page. I think it's the bottom right of every
page. Just drop your email addressing there. Well, it's our only mailing
list you have, although I do get fancy with some mailings, whether it's
worldwide or US only type of thing. But well, you know, we've
had pictures of the current Maestro at the at the lab being tested for our
five missions, which was pretty cool, sitting by itself on a plastic table
in the middle of a big anaerobic chamber with what I think it had power
cable, microphone and a couple of cables. Just start of hanging in and
then the guys go to work and it's still going to be Now, Michael,
you told me, I think you told me this at Dayton. It
might have been. It might have been as far back as Orlando. Actually,
But explain, because I already know the answer to this, but I
want the audience to hear it. Explain why it took so long with the
whole seven or eighty inch screen thing. I'll let Eric explain. You're probably
closer to it. Yeah, Well, I mean the kind of the bottom
line is we're sticklers for We wanted to deliver a high quality display experience.
It's kind of our calling card, right to have a nice display with the
pan adapter and the waterfall, and so there just aren't that many eight inch
screens out there that have the kind of resolution that we wanted to deliver.
So being able to find that and source it and know that they're still going
to be around, you know, next month when we need another you know,
however many of them, that was a challenge. And then of course
there's the okay, we found that screen, and now how does that interface
to the compute engine that's on the back end. So figuring all that out
and knowing that we can source those reliably and not have to redesign it in
three months kind of thing, is uh, and then qualifying all of those
and getting them certified all of that. So yes, and several rounds of
that. We went down that road with a couple of different displays, only
to find that either something didn't work or they couldn't be provided at the numbers
that we were requesting. And you know, all of that comes to light
when you start to say, all right, we need a thousand of those
and they go, oh well in that case, yeah, so yeah,
and correct me if I'm wrong on this when I say this. But the
problem with the Maestro B, I guess is whicher I was just calling it
V two. But was that Dell stopped making that eight inch tablet? Is
that is that accurate? That's correct, and that's actually what happened to the
Maestro A. The original tablet that it was also manufactured by Dell went away,
and so we went to a different model and we're actually not using any
tablet this go around. So we're hoping that'll give us a little bit longer
legs, definitely more compute power, so it should be a little beef heer
and more responsive. So it's it's going to be a nice product. We're
looking forward to getting out to people. It's got external HDMI connection so you
can hook up an external monitor. There you go. It's got the battery
packs. Shipping batteries is a pain in the butt. Yes, yeah,
okay, so it's gonna come with the battery. Unlike that because the one
I have didn't come with the battery. No, you know, you can
order a battery, but you don't have to order it from us. It's
incredibly popular. I think it's generally used in the eng market. Battery packs
fairly standard battery pack worldwide. Still USB a connector connected battery like the old
one was no no, no, okay with its own And what else was
I going to say about it? Yeah, so you can get them anywhere.
It it runs on eighteen or twenty four volts, so it doesn't run
on twelve volts. But the uh and we're we're reselling the batteries as a
convenience. They'll be blunt. We're not making any money on the batteries because
we just have to match, you know, we don't. We can't go
buy like twenty thousand batteries like somebody and say, hey, we have to
get a great price. Break So anyway, but their batteries will be available
and looks pretty cool. We posted like said we put there. I'll go
ahead, Eric, Sorry, I was just going to point out. Another
key feature of the Maestro c is that you'll be able to charge the battery
while it's in the unit. Oh thank you, I have the plug then,
Yeah, so that was one of the things to be a nice feature.
Yeah, that was one of the things I didn't like about my Maestro.
I think I have the b I have the one with the button on
the side, the left side as you're looking at it, not the top.
I think the first one had it on the top. Mine has a
side. Yeah. So so there was just a USBA cable coming out of
the back of the Maestro and you could buy like a bat like a fifteen
twenty thousand million hour battery pack on Amazon Universal plug it in, run it
almost all day, great, wonderful, but it wouldn't charge that battery if
you were to plug and also Maestrow also comes with a power cable, and
I always thought it was a little bit strange that it wouldn't charge that battery
if you're plugged into AC power. I can tell this story, okay,
because I was an alpha tester when the first A came out, and that
was exactly what Flex Radio wanted to do. You got your battery pack,
stick it in the back, have it charge while you're using it. Why
not, just like anything intels and everything. And I I remember Gerald was
working on it and I was on the alpha team, And turns out that
not every OEM battery pack behaves the same way when you charge it. Well
that's and some automatically came on, so automatically he didn't. Some would brick
the maestro, right, you know, these are the things you learned,
you know, you build the first I don't know how many hundred and type
of thing. And so I was on the other side of that fence going
well, this is nuts, and you know, I'm like you, right,
but uh, these are the things you learn when you build anything.
Or how hard can it be? Well, it's it's pretty hard to build
just about anything. And we have friends in the hamm radio business. Jason,
I know that they're building small ham well you know, backyard garage industry
stuff, and it's painful. Oh yeah, yeah, totally. That's the
short story on that. Why you can't charge the battery? Cool? Okay,
all right? Well, any anything else from from the chat, Frank
or from or from Eric or Mike whichever. Well, from the chat,
a couple of people were asking any hints or thoughts on the new features on
the radio you want to give out? No, fair enough, and the
reason we do actually there's a let me explain. This is a good time.
Let me explain why that we do that, or why we don't do
that, or why nobody does it anymore? If you're still selling radios in
next week, hey, we're going to build a new radio. It's going
to be out in time for dating. You've just killed your sales. Yeah
yeah, allcraft saw that they announced the K four. It killed the K
three sales, right, So uh, it's it's hard. You mean,
we want to brag about it if there is, but you know, there's
nothing to say. I'm not re announcing anything. I can say. The
geeky hand of me has seen some cool ideas fly around, but are they
can they come to market? Will they make you know, they're gonna make
us money? And will you buy it? You know, this is a
really cool idea, but yeah, you can to spend three thousand dollars for
this, No, so it doesn't come to market type of idea, right
Eric. You know the other piece of that is a lot of times we're
working on things in an R and D kind of environment, and even if
we have it partially working, doesn't thatcessarily mean that it's ready for productization yet?
So if you know, it's it can be hard to talk about things
like that that are exciting and we're excited about them, but if we talk
about them and people say, well, why hasn't this been released yet?
And it's because there are things It's one thing to make something work once in
a lab. It's another thing to make it work every time, reliably for
every customer and lots of different situations. So you know, it's it's a
we like to talk about things once they're really productized and ready for launch so
that people can enjoy them. Yeah, we'd love to tell you that some
ideas, Yeah, you get ninety percent of the way there. Yeah,
and no Workie Yeah, we just have to ask even the answers. No,
you know, the people want to totally, they want the question to
ask. Yeh, that's true. Don wants to know when the M model
sixty four hundred and sixty six hundred are Are those going to be upgraded to
the new bots and screens at the same time that the Maestro is being released?
Yeah, I think the delivery time. We're trying to hit a boat.
The same thing from a manufacturing perspective, and Eric's same idea, right,
new display, a display, not a tablet, and a supporting processor
to drive it, right. Yeah, that's accurate. And they will share
the same kind of back end architecture, so all the things that we just
talked about that will be improvements other than the battery. Of course, you
don't need a battery for an N model since it's on your desktop. But
yeah, all the other compute engine and display kind of stuff will be from
the same architecture. So yep, coming soon. Good, excellent, Well,
guys, I really appreciate your time tonight. If anybody else has any
last minute words or comments or anything, feel free Mic or Eric, either
one of you. You can any questions you could go ahead, Eric you
start, I was, I'm gonna say, I appreciate the time, thanks
for having us on. Yeah, we need to do this a little bit
more often. Michael and I we trade emails back and forth every now and
then. We keep saying, hey, we need to get you back on,
need to get you back on. So I need to be a little
bit more proactive about getting you guys back on the show a little bit more
because I love I've used my flex all the time. I love it,
and I'm looking forward to the new Maestro. I need to upgrade. I
need to get the sixty six hundred so I can let Bob test the sixty
four hundred with the with the Android stuff, and that's kind of where we
want to go from there. A little bit let out of the bag.
Everybody knew who I was talking about. Anyway, Well, Bob and I
have been on my It's probably been a year or so ago now, but
we've been on the live stream a couple of times talking about doing that.
He's like, man, I just need to get a radio down here.
I'm like, well, I'm waiting for him to get operating privileges in Mexico
so I can go down there and activate some of those parks down there.
Looking forward to that. We're getting more and more developers that are grabbing radios
and we look what your uri UT four LW is done from skimmer. You
know what you're going. I mean, he's blowing it out of the water.
And he got a radio finally, so you know he was he was
remoted into my stuff from time to time. And uh uh and this,
you know, the the infrastructure ecosystem geeky connected thing is all good too.
And if, by the way, anybody's in any questions said, you can
call us or if you're an email person, Info at Flex Radio dot Com
comes to me and my boss, but or Hams at Flex Radio dot Com
Calm comes to a bunch more of us. But uh yeah, you can
fire off anything. Well, I answer you, and we try to.
And by the way, I sometimes give answers people don't like, but I'll
give you an answer so you're not just waiting. I'm really good about not
saying uh oh, yeah, we're gonna do that when we're never gonna do
it. I'll i that we uh the one we get a couple of questions
like that, but I'll at least you can then go forward and make a
decision, right right, true true, cool guys. Well, once again,
thank you for your time. Really really great infro coming out of uh
uh. You know a lot of times people, I do a lot of
I do a lot of videos about all kinds of radios across the entire spectrum
of HAM radio. And one one of the greatest things about Ham Radio,
our Flex Radio is that not only are they made in the USA, they're
made right here in Texas. So those videos are on the channel too.
We go through the whole manufacturing plant about four years ago. I need to
get back down there. I was talking to Matt about that at at Orlando
earlier this year and I was like, man, I need to get back
down there because you guys have done a lot of changes since then. But
uh yeah, yeah, yeah you do too. We should we should coordinate.
That be fun. But uh yeah. So so thank you for your
time tonight. Really cool stuff coming out of Flex Radio, and we're gonna
keep in touch and do some more videos like this upcoming. So yeah,
go check out FlexRadio dot com everybody, and thank you for the uh,
thank you for the time to night. Everybody in the chat and to uh
into both of you guys into YouTube, Frank. So all right, guys,
everyone, have a good night. We're gonna sign off and we'll catch
you tomorrow on the premiere that I have tomorrow afternoon. So seventy three all,
seventy three later Bye,