September 2013 – Kev's Development Toolbox

September 15, 2013

Is it worth running Windows just to use Ham Radio Deluxe?

I spent some time over the weekend using Ham Radio Deluxe running on an HP Mini netbook, and came to the conclusion that the netbook doesn’t really have enough horsepower to give a good experience with HRD. It’s just too sluggish opening the apps and moving back and forward between the Log app and the DM780 digital modes app. I did enjoy having the ability to automatically log my QSOs though, so I’ve spent some more time to investigate how I can make better use of the apps I’ve been using up until now on my Mac.

Turns out that RUMLog will watch the log files from FLDIGI and automatically copy new logged QSOs across from FLDIGI, so this is a good step in the right direction. For JT65-OSX, although it’s not automated, it will write to an ADIF file and then you can import that into RUMLog manually, so that’s better than nothing.

Sorry HRD, you’re just too bloated and I’m not interested in buying a new Windows machine just to run you. For now I think I’m going back to the apps I was already using on my Mac. Turns out RUMLog is actually pretty good 🙂

September 15, 2013

Showing/hiding hidden files in Mac OS X Finder

Great tip here on how to show hidden files in Finder:

To show, enter this command in a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

To hide:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

September 12, 2013

Ham Radio Deluxe 5.24 – PSK macros won’t save

As a Mac user and a new ham operator starting to play with digital modes (mainly JT65, PSK31 and RTTY) I’ve been envious of the variety of Windows based apps available compared to what’s available on the Mac. For the past few weeks I’ve been mainly using the following:

RUMLog – as my main logging app
FLDIGI or CocoaModem as my digital mode app
JT65-HF ported to the Mac

These have all been working fine, but from seeing videos online of people using HRD and the integrated digital mode app together with the HRD logging, it kept bothering me every time I had to manually type in details from a QSO into my logging app.

Since we have a HP Mini netbook running Windows 7, I decided to check out the still (up until fairly recently) free version of Ham Radio Deluxe (5.24), and was surprised to find I couldn’t work out how to make my updates to my PSK macros save. Every time I made changes in the Macro Manager, they would never be reflected in the app.

It turns out that from a new installation, HRD either protects the directory where your macros files are saved, and/or installs the default macro files as read-only, so no matter what you do in the app, you can never save any updates to your macro files. What’s worse, the app doesn’t give any indication that it’s failing to save your updates, it just carries on regardless.

Luckily I can across this thread and once I took off the r/o flag on the macro files I was able to save my edits.

Now that HRD 6.x+ is $100, I’m not sure if I’m that enthusiastic about spending $100 on an app that doesn’t by default allow me to customize my preferences, and worse still, doesn’t tell me when something is failing (incorrect permissions to write to a file). Still, I am impressed with the digital modes and log integration, so I’m going to be trying it out for a while and see how it goes.