Ham Radio – A contact sport

I’ve been following the development of the latest SDR HF transceiver… the Flex-3000. This radio began shipping last week – so we should start to read real world reviews and hear them on-the-air.  FlexRadio Systems is famous for their pc-driven ham radios without knobs and their high marks in the NC0B (Sherwood Engineering) Dynamic Range Narrow Spaced receiver scores.

The Flex 3000 is the little brother to the FlexRadio 5000 series. It currently lists for under $1600 with a built-in ATU… which seems to me to be a very attractive price.

Unlike its "big brother" (the Flex 5000 SDR HF transceiver), the Flex 3000:

• Has 1 BNC connector rather than 3 SO-239s for TX
• Does not offer a RX antenna jacks
• Is only 1.7 inches tall
• Uses a different front-end filter configuration. 5^th order band pass filters for 80-6m.  7^th order band pass filter for 160m. Low pass filter for BCB band.
• Uses a 96 kHz wide panadapter display (rather than the 192 kHz found in the Flex 5000)
• Does not allow cross band/cross mode operation
• Does not offer an optional second receiver (RX2)

The question remains… is ham radio ready to go knobless?