This is a terrific review. You identify what's important to you so we can
understand your thinking, and you give your reasons for preferring one program
over another. Very useful for all of us.
Jim - K6XZ
----- Original Message -----
From: Ed Hekman
To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 1:11 AM
Subject: [digitalradio] The best of all features
It looks like the thread on MixW has run the course but I wanted to make a
few comments about what I felt were the best features of each of the programs
that I have used.
I started with Digipan and stayed with it for over 5 years because it was
simple to setup and use. The capability to receive in panoramic mode and carry
on a QSO at the same time has become very important to my style of operating. I
grew very dependent on the capability to use the F1 key to bring up the qrz.com
page for the call sign entered in the log. Unfortunately I experienced some
crashes with the last version that were too frequent to be ignored. That and
the lack of other modes motivated me to try some of the other programs. The
programs I have tried so far include HRD/DM780, MixW, fldigi and MultiPSK.
MixW was the next program I used but never as much as Digipan. The absence of
a panoramic decoder prevented me from adopting as the only or primary program.
It is nice that I was able to configure the functions keys to be the same that
I had become accustomed to with Digipan. And one uniquie feature of MixW that I
have used many times is the capability to select many transmissions to monitor
- each in separate windows - and to be able to select a different transmissionj
mode for each of those windows. It is not as straightforward as it could be but
it can be done.
DM780 was the next program that I spent some getting to know. Limited
computer power did cause some problems when DM780 was running concurrently with
my weather station program, Weather Display. Weather Display would crash very
consistently with significant activity in DM780 and even more quickly when
iexplorer was running. But now with a much more capable PC I have been
exploring other very nice features of DM780. The capability to push a button
and have the radio shift frequency to put the signal of interest in the center
of the narrow passband is extremely valuable for operating in crowded band
conditions. The capability to carry on a QSO with the screen operating in
panoramic mode is very important to me. The automation posting of spots to PSK
Reporter and the automatic uploading of QSOs to eQSL and LOTW is very nice. The
one drawback for me is the inability to assign operations to the function keys
to match the configurations used with Digipan, Mixw, fldigi and MultiPSK.
I dabbled with MultiPSK over the years but began using in daily last year
when I discovered that it had the capability to capture call signs spotted.
With a utility from Sholto, KE7HPV, this is being used to automatically post
call signs dexcoded to the web page, www.hamspots.net. I also did some
experiments with the ALE400 mode with good success.
fldigi comes the closest to replicating the simplicity and ease of use of
Digipan but it adds many other modes and features. The ability to open the
panoramic window and the logbook separately from the main QSO screen is very
nice since I like to be able to decode other transmissions while I am in a QSO.
The radio interface is a nice bonus that was setup quite easily for a couple
radios. The capability to automatically post to PSK Reporter is a nice feature
but I haven't been successful with that yet. The capability to integrate with
DXKeeper with a 3rd party bridge is also nice but I haven't succeded with that
yet either. And I think the flarq program greatly expands the usefulness to
methods of operating beyond the normal one on one QSO. fldigi has been the
primary program here since last fall until I acquired a more powerful computer
that could more easily handle DM780. One very nice feature of DM780 that I use
frequently is the capability to hit a button and have the radio and the program
switch the radio frequency and the audio frequency to put the desired signal in
the center of the radios narrow band filter.
That is a brief synopsys of the highlights of each of the programs for me.
Thing to look forward to:
Panoramic screen decoding over bandwidths of 24 KHz up to 192 KHz.
More SOMR (single operator, multiple radio) capability.
Better integration with logging packages across the various programs to a
common database on the network.
It is quite late here now so anything I say from now on will probably be
nonsense so I will terminate this for now and hope that others will offer their
highlights and lowlights of the currently available software and their
wishlists for the next generation of radio software.
Thanks,
Ed
WB6YTE
.
