Ham Radio Deluxe Blacklist Official Apology

As I am one of the bloggers that wrote about the Ham Radio DeLuxe issue I feel I have to give this link to my blog readers as well. I think the HRD developers do their best to earn the trust of users worldwide. But at the end people draw their own conclusion.

http://qrznow.com/ham-radio-deluxe-blacklist-official-apology/

2016 statistics

Just for archive reasons like every year I post some graphs about my radio activity. Though due to a lack of time I was unable to post this in 2016. Unlike previous years I will rely on the statistics of clublog at least for the DXCC part of it.

The activity this year seems to be a lot less as previous years. At least 1K less QSOs were made. I hope this will not be a trend for next years. However the percentage of digimode and CW have been rising.

Total DXCC worked all time, all mode. 6 ATNO over the year 2016. I expect it will take time before I will work new ones again.

Total DXCC confirmed by official QSL, no eQSL. Only paper and LOTW.

Confirmed by official QSL: SSB, CW, RTTY (digimode). Although there has to be a error in the log somewhere as I notice a phone QSO on 30m which has not been made...I will have to review my log.

 Most of the QSOs were made in March just like 2015 but a lot less as I was working QRP first 3 months of the year. However the quality of each QSO was a lot better.

In 2015 my favorite band was 40m, this year it was 80m. Don't count 60m out as I made a considerable amount of QSOs on this new band in 2016.

SSB is still my main mode although I like to experiment with digimode. Managed QSOs in 11 different modes. 

The downfall of Ham Radio Deluxe

Lately some very unpleasant things happen regarding Ham Radio DeLuxe. First of all the issue most of you heard of a while ago.

http://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/ham-radio-deluxe-support-hacked-my-computer.547962/

Basically the user of HRD V6.* was blocked after some troubles in which he called for support. No good advertisement for a commercial software package.

Now it seems HRD V6 deliberately shutdown JT-Alert (a program that supports the populair WSJT-X and many other JT digimode software) without any warning to the user. There are some other issues as well that Laurie VK3AMA (the programmer of JT-Alert) made a decision not to support HRD V6 any longer in the newer versions.

His message last week:

To all JTAlert / HRD V6 users. 

I will no longer be providing support for HRD V6 logging within JTAlert.
This comes into effect with the next public release of JTAlert (2.9.0).

Affected HRD users can continue to use the current version of JTAlert (2.8.7) for as long as they want.
I will not be able to provide any support for that version, however, if a future HRD release breaks the JTAlert/HRD integration.

The free V5 of HRD will continue to be supported.

Moving forward, all future JTAlert versions will not support HRD V6 logging.

I will not be participating in any public or private discussions regarding this decision.

I sincerely apologise to the affected HRD users.

de Laurie VK3AMA

Since JT-Alert is the most used and most populair program to use bridging JT mode software with your own logger I guess this will affect HRD again. Many will look for alternative loggers now.

Is this the downfall of Ham Radio Deluxe?

I'm using HRD myself and will continue V4 for main logging and V5 for digimode logging. They are free and JT-Alert will continue the support for version 5.