Ham Radio DeluxeSome regular visitors of this blog know I’m working on a WordPress Plugin to show your HRD Logbook online. Finally version 1.0 is out now. A brand new page on this blog is dedicated to the plugin. It is a typical 1.0-version so no bells and whistles yet. Just put the php-file in your plugin dir and enable it on your pluginpage.

On the wish list:

– adding visitors interaction with selecting periods, search for call etc.
– adding admin-panel to alter layout and columns;
– adding a log-entry on admin-panel for web entry of qso’s;
– adding the plugin to the central WP-plugin directory.

If you have feature requests, please post them as a comment or mail me from the contactpage. I promise I’ll take a look at it and see if I be able to integrate it in the code.

HRD-On-a-MacLast evening I was thinking about buying a copy of VMware Fusion. I’ve used VMware Fusion trial to create a vm for hacking the bootROM of a Sun Cobalt RaQ550 three weeks ago. When I was using VMware Fusion I noticed it had seen my Boot Camp partition on my Mac with Windows XP for ham software that only runs on Windows. I enjoyed the fact that I was able to boot my Boot Camp partition in a virtual machine. But I still had to switch to my vm to use Ham Radio Deluxe.
Last week my VMware Fusion was running out of trial and I got the option to buy the software. But 80 euro’s was a little overpriced for me. So I waited. And the waiting did pay off, because yesterday I got the offer to buy the soft for 49 euro’s!
But the best has yet to come: when I entered the bought serial, I got also a new option: Unity. When I started the Boot Camp vm, I start HRD and click on Unity. Now HRD appears in my Mac desktop as a normal application! Absolutely awesome! This is what I wanted! Thank you guys of VMware, you make great software!

HamRadioDeluxeHam Radio Deluxe has a pretty cool feature where you can logon to a DX-cluster and the spots from the cluster are presented on a band scale just beside your logbook. This way you can see in one glans what stations are on the band. If you click on the call in the scale, your radio automatically tunes to that frequency and if you have your add-screen open, the call will be polled from QRZ.com.
Very handy indeed! But I missed out on something. Before I became using the telnetcluster option in HRD I always had DXwatch open to look for good DX-stations (and sometimes I still have to see the overall activity on the HF-bands). A really neath feature of DXwatch is you can filter on spotters. For instance: it’s not really handy to be informed about a contact between a amateur in the US and an amateur in Japan when you’re located in Europe (like I am). Little change I’ll be able to hear both/one of these stations. On the other hand: I would really want to know about all the qso’s between amateurs in my region (region 14) and anyone outside that region. On DXwatch you simply make a filter to only show spotters from region 14 and voila! You’ve a pretty good change to hear all the stations who are spotted!
I really missed that feature in HRD so I went asking around. Nobody really had a clue how to do this. One colleague-amateur advised me to install VE7CC-1 CC Cluster software. This program connects to the telnetcluster and HRD connects to the program. I’ve tried it, incredible complicated, didn’t make any sense to me, couldn’t even get it running. I think it’s a little overblown for only filter spotters.
Then I started to read about telnetcluster software. I know little to nothing about these services but maybe it is possible to fix something there. And what turned out? It’s possible! Just hit the [Show] button in the DX Cluster window in HRD Logbook when you’re logged in a telnetcluster and hit [Console]. Now you can enter commands to the cluster. Just enter: “accept/spots by_zone 14” and hit enter. Now this filter will be saved on that particular telnetcluster for you. If you login next time, the filter still wil be active. If you want to know what filter is in use, just enter: “sh/filter’ and hit enter. The cluster will tell you what filters are active.

Another great link is this one.

I hope I helped more amateurs out there with this, don’t think I’m the only newbie with telnet clusters. At least I didn’t found a lot of hints and tricks on Google…