Station

The Station

Currently I operate an Elecraft K3 mostly in the digital modes. I finished off the interior of a tool shed and use it as a radio shack. It doubles as a clean tool shed and a music studio. For antennas I use a multiband doublet that is resonate on 40m. It is up about 40 feet in the trees around the shack. I also have a full-sized 20m rotatable dipole, a 10m rotatable dipole and a Comet CX-333 vertical for 2m and 70cm. There is a map of the rest of the gear below.

Using Boot Camp on a vintage iMac, I run Windows 8.1 native.

I started my digital operations using DigiPan 2.0 in 2007 and I liked the simplicity of the interface and the look of the DigiPan waterfall. However, the logging capabilities of Digipan left me looking for a new program to control my digital on-air operations. I looked at Digital Master 780 because so many operators I made contact with were using it, but I found the look of the interface daunting and couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. Mix W was far more robust than DigiPan and I used it for a few years and honed my digital operating skills.

Then a friend showed me his Digital Master 780 interface and I loved it! It looked nothing like the DM780 straight-out-ofithe box default interface. It took a lot of trial and error, but the GUI was customizable to fantastic degree. I’ve been using the Ham Radio Deluxe suite for over a decade now.

So software that works well for the beginner isn’t necessarily software that suits the more experienced user.