Remote CW on a Flex6600 and iPad/iPhone

I’ve owned a Flex6600M for many years, and use it daily.  One of the things that it absolutely excels at is accessing the radio remotely.  Initially I did that by having a Flex Maestro (essentially a remote head for the radio) in my 3rd floor bedroom.  I beat the heck out of scrambling down stairs to get to the actual radio on the ground floor.  It works just fine for voice or CW, and two of my weekly CWTs are done that way.

Marcus DL8MRE has been providing an excellent version of SmartSDR for the Mac/iPhone/iPad, and I’ve been using that extensively with my iPad/iPhone at home and on the road.  The built-in FT8 mode and logbook makes that mode easy.  You can do voice using the built-in microphone on the device, but CW seemed to be a long-shot (where do you plug in your paddle on a iPad?).

Enter another company, Lynovation, and the CTR2-MIDI .  This is a small “knob” device that attaches to your iPhone/iPad via a USB charging cable, and provides a jack for your paddle.  There is a knob (defaults to a frequency knob) and a handful of buttons that allow you to control important parts of your Flex remotely.

You can see the CTR2-MIDI knob in the upper right corner of the photo.  A paddle with a magnetic base is attached to a magnetic stainless steel clipboard below that.  And you can see the iPad version of  the SmartSDR software running.

While I won’t go into details, the “MIDI” part of the knob is the key to this product working with Apple devices, and also providing a great CW experience even over wonky remote internet connections.  The sidetone is generated locally with no delays or stuttering.  I use it all the time at 30 WPM.