I’ll probably review the HRD Logbook, some of its functions, awards tracking and their one click LoTW upload/download utility. That’s about it for this Part I review of Ham Radio Deluxe. Easy stuff, and as always HRD is rock solid. I can watch the pointer follow the rotator in real time and am also assured the antenna is where I want it. One click on 315° and my antenna is on its way to Japan. If I want to change the rotator heading all I have to do is click the new heading and HRD Rotator in combination with my chosen electronic controller do the rest. Logging, DX Cluster, rotator control, audio recording, QRZ lookup, and more. As you can see I have the screen stacked with several utilities in HRD. Here’s a snapshot of my HRD Logbook program with one rotator chosen. I point & shoot with the mouse so no more holding down levers or fingers slipping off the controller brake for me! In my case, the Hy-Gain Tailtwister rotator on Com 3 is powered by our Ham Supply Rotor-EZ With RS 232 board mounted inside a Hy-Gain controller, Com 4 is a Alpha Spid “RAK” rotator powered by an Alpha Spid electronic controller, and Com 5 is a Yaesu G-800 rotator powered by our internal Ham Supply RotorCard mounted in a Yaesu G-800DXA controller. HRD remembers my settings so I only have to set them once initially, then the program remembers them every time I open HRD. I simply set the rotator type, set the com port for each rotator, set for 1 second refresh interval from the pulldown menu, and “connect”.

Here’s a screenshot of HRD Rotator controlling my three electronic controllers (click to enlarge): For my three electronic rotor controllers HRD Rotator is absolutely fantastic! I’ll probably make a few more Blog posts on the features in Ham Radio Deluxe over the coming months, but I’ll keep this post to just the HRD Rotator program. Frankly I got tired of trying to stay on top of changes so I finally moved on over to the one-time “paid” version. But over the years since Simon sold HRD in 2011, the only way to update the Country Manager database or Unique Callsign database was to edit them yourself. For years I used the free version of Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) by Simon, HB9DRV.

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