Software!

I’ve been browsing around at all of the great radio-related software out there the last couple of days. I can’t necessarily use much of it at the moment since all I have is my little handheld, but it’s interesting to look at the possibilities.

One of the more interesting finds is something I’m sure many of the old-timers are familiar with, but it’s new to me: Ham Radio Deluxe.

I’m primarily a Mac guy, but I’m not so tied to the platform that I can’t see the value in a good piece of non-Mac software. In fact, I have Windows 7 installed as dual boot on my MacBook, and I have a dedicated XP machine at home (which is actually sharing a partitioned disk with Ubuntu, but since this isn’t a computer blog, I won’t bore you with too many details). There are some really nice things about HRD: it’s mature, it’s got a ton of capabilities, version 5 has a web-based logging tool that’s available, and best of all—it’s free!

I’d encourage anyone to take a look at all of the radio-related software out there. There are loggers, antenna design apps, radio controllers… you name it! I’ll see if I can start building a list of interesting stuff here on my site. It’s been done before, but it seems to me that a lot of the software lists out there are fairly out of date.