Station Snapshot – W1HKJ

Welcome to another edition of the Station Snapshot.  This edition comes to us from David Freese, W1HKJ, the 2014 ARRL Technical Excellence Award winner and the developer of the Fl* suite of software, including Fldigi, Flrig, Flamp, Flwkey, and more. David shares the following: “I’m reminded of the adage ‘clear desk – messy mind; messy desk – clear mind.’ Running all of these computers is like playing an 8 manual organ! 90% of my time is spent on software development, 10% on operating. From left to right:”

On the portable table, Notebook – Mint-17 OS Gateway Windows 8.1 test machine Intel Mac-Mini – alternate operating computer Lenovo S10, dual boot XP / Mint-17 test and demo computer FT-950 below center LCD screen HP Compaq (a resale item from Staples) running Mint-17; primary operating/testing computer, started life as a business machine running XP Pro Acer, dual boot Vista / Mint-13; this is the primary development computer Power Mac G4 with an Mini-Mac G4 sitting on top.

David adds that the Mac Mini G4 is actually faster than the Power Mac which he picked up at the latest Huntsville Hamfest for $100.  The Mini is the primary OS X build machine while the Power Mac is the backup. In addition, David uses a Dell Venue 8″ Android tablet for testing remote ops [not shown].

Finally, David adds that “I do experiment with antennas and prefer homebrew antennas.  The current antenna farm consists of a set of fan dipoles 80 – 10 meters, and a 2 meter diameter copper pipe mag loop 40/30/20 meters.”

As a reminder, David is the primary developer of the excellent Fl* suite of programs.  The entire suite is open-source, cross-platform and available free of charge from www.w1hkj.com.

Thank you, David, for you sharing your Station Snapshot with MacHamRadio.

If you’re reading this and are interested in having your station profiled as a Station Snapshot, send a brief description of your station, hardware and software in use, along with any interesting tidbits of information to [email protected].  We will profile one station every week or two and you will be able to share your hobby with other MacHamRadio users around the world.