I was skimming through the discussion threads on the Flex Community and another one came up regarding recommendations for the best logging software to use on the Flex. DXLabs - one module showing who is contacting whom… It’s focus is primarily on chasing DX (distant contaccts) and, the interface was just too much for me to deal with. HRDeluxe - quite busy, but it does a LOT (this is just the Logger….)ĭXLabs is similar to HRDeluxe in that it does a LOT of stuff, but there are quite a few modules to download and integrate together. I needed something simpler that would integrate well with the Flex.

HRDeluxe is a pretty powerful package, but it’s a LOT more than just logging (antenna positioning, propogation monitoring, antenna switching, etc. N1MM’s interface - pretty minimalistic, but it’s for ‘Contesting’ 🙂 It will work as a general logger, but that’s not it’s forte. N1MM for instance, is designed and built as a contesting log package. Others were/are for very specific situations. Some were very difficult to get setup and working with the Flex (they still used old RS-232 connections for data transfer). I dabbled a bit with some of the better known logging programs - N1MM, HRD Deluxe, DXLabs and the like, but none of them really suited my needs. When the Flex came into the shack, I was pretty set in my ‘logging ways’ so I didn’t really think about logging software any more. When it did finally get working, I found I still neeeded to fill in most of the log entry by hand (all that was coming into the logging software was the frequency, date and time) and then re-type into all the other programs, so I gave up. Setting it up to work was challenging as the FT-991 has a rather simplisttic USB interface and getting data to flow still needed a lot of RS-232-era ‘bit setting’ to get it to go. I initially played around with some logging apps and attempted to integrate them with my Yaesu FT-991 (my first rig after I got back in 2015). The pitch was that by having the logging software track what you do on the radio automatically (such as frequency, mode, power output, etc.) that it would automagically fill in that info in the log - leaving only a few elements such as signal reports, names, and other comments to be provided by the operator. It’s low tech and always available, but it does require considerable re-typing effort to input the results into various databases for confirmation, awards and printing.Īfter my re-start in ham radio in 2015 and especially after I acquired the Flex radio in 2016, I started dabbling in ‘logging software’ which could be directly integrated with the transceiver. Last time, we talked about logging of contacts in general and my travails in maintaining a manual, handwritten log.

Ham radio logging software