Hey Stan you were right on the money, another hijacked thread gone down the tubes by hams who own radio's not even related to the one the post is about, the real shame is Flex and also the Anan groups are very small numbers when you look at actually radio's sold to the Amateur radio public, the Number one seller is Icom but they also have other branches of the communications market that keeps them going as well. Number two is Yaesu and lest not forget how many radio systems they sell to China for other usages besides amateur's. Number three is Kenwood which still tries to go for the commercial two way radio market but they are not as forceful as they use to be cause they are a very small part of JVC.
Flex's claim to fame is being able to do remote station easy, there performance is good but its more for the ham that wants his GUI on a big screen monitor but they are still working on the extras like a better noise blanker and noise reduction system. Anan also has the GUI market as well, they really don't use any remote software so its in the shack type rig but they are leaders in noise reduction and noise blanking plus here again a very good RX section. For the hobbyist who want to go wide and try AM or have that wide ESSB sound these two radio's excel against all others so we are looking at a very small percentage of this market but for the majority of hams today they still prefer knobs to a mouse, they want some kind of computer control but for them every time there station computer has a glitch they don't wanna re boot the whole system. Bottom line there is something to be said for stand alone rigs today.