Flex6700

[sboutwell]

Request preparation

• I used an AI assistant to help structure this request
• I checked for existing issues covering the same feature

What would you like?

The Flex 6700 hardware supports 8 slices. At this time the AetherSDR software only supports 4. Please expand this Software to support 8 slices. At this time only 4 may be opened. Please keep up the good work.

[aethersdr-agent]

Thanks for the report! The FLEX-6700's 8-slice capability is a known gap in the UI layer. Here's my analysis:

Root cause

The core slice engine is actually dynamic — RadioModel::handleRadioStatus() updates m_maxSlices from the radio's reported slices status field (src/models/RadioModel.cpp:2205), so the radio-side limit of 8 should already be respected for slice creation/rejection logic. The real bottleneck is that several UI components are hardcoded to 4 slices:

1. SliceColors.h — Only 4 colour entries (A=cyan, B=magenta, C=green, D=yellow). Slices E–H fall back to a default blue via sliceId & 3 wrapping or bounds checks, so they'd share colours with A–D.

2. PanadapterApplet.cpp:273 — The letters[] array is "ABCD" with a bounds check of < 4, so slices 4–7 display as ? in the panadapter title bar.

3. SliceColors.h:22 — kSliceColorCount = 4 is used for bounds checks in VfoWidget, RxApplet, and SpectrumWidget to decide whether to use a slice colour or fall back to a default.

4. MainWindow.h:152 — kCatChannels = 4 limits rigctld/PTY CAT control to 4 channels (ports 4532–4535, symlinks A–D). Slices E–H would have no CAT channel.

5. SpectrumWidget.cpp:513 — Uses sliceId & 3 to index the colour table, so slices E–H would get the same colours as A–D.

Note: VfoWidget and CatApplet already use "ABCDEFGH" letter arrays with bounds checks up to 8, so those are fine.

Proposed fix

1. Expand SliceColors.h — Add 4 more colour entries (E–H) with distinct hues (e.g. orange, teal, coral, lavender) and update kSliceColorCount to 8.

2. Fix PanadapterApplet::setSliceId() — Change letters[] from "ABCD" to "ABCDEFGH" and the bounds check from < 4 to < 8.

3. Fix SpectrumWidget::sliceColor() — Change sliceId & 3 to sliceId & 7 (or use % kSliceColorCount after the colour table is expanded).

4. Expand kCatChannels — This is a larger change. We could either:

   • Make it model-dependent (8 for 6700, 4 for others), or
   • Increase to 8 globally (extra channels would just be unused on 4-slice radios).

The first three changes are straightforward. The CAT channel expansion is the most involved since it affects rigctld server allocation, PTY symlink creation, and the CAT applet UI layout.

Questions

• Are you currently seeing slices E–H created successfully on the radio side (just with wrong colours / ? labels), or does the creation itself fail at 4? This would help confirm whether the radio is reporting slices=8 in its status properly.
• Do you need CAT control (rigctld/hamlib) for all 8 slices, or is the primary need just having them visible and usable in the UI?

[aethersdr-agent]

Claude here — fix applied in PR #1290: #1290

What was changed: Support 8 slices for Flex 6700 (#1281)

Files touched:

• src/gui/MainWindow.cpp
• src/gui/MainWindow.h
• src/gui/PanadapterApplet.cpp
• src/gui/SliceColors.h
• src/gui/SpectrumWidget.cpp

— AetherClaude (automated agent for AetherSDR)