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.