I had the opportunity to catch up with Mike Carper, WA9PIE, at the Orlando Hamcation today. Mike is one of the two current owners of Ham Radio Deluxe, the incredibly popular software used by radio amateurs to control their radios and handle logging and other tasks. HRD Software LLC went through some rough times in 2016, but Mike reports that 2017 was a great year under reconstituted management.
In 2017, Roger Hardin joined the company as a full-time software developer. In 2018, Mike plans to add several developers to address a backlog of bug reports as well as work on new feature releases. Joining the team on a part-time basis is well known radio amateur Tomas Hood, NW7US. They plan to follow an 80/20 approach. Mike anticipates that 80% of the effort will be devoted to correcting software defects and 20% will be devoted to rolling out new features.
In addition to addressing customer concerns around QSL label printing and Cabrillo contest log generation, there is a planned major change around how rig control definitions are handled. Mike announced at Hamcation that they plan to externalize rig definitions via XML. This means that end users will gain the ability to tweak features and implement their own definitions. Watch for this sometime later in the year.
Mike has also instituted a lot of process around documenting customer reported incidents as well as software development and testing. The process has led to a more transparent approach to product changes. Any customer can now view a change log to see what issues have been addressed in a particular release via the web. The User Manual has also been converted to an online wiki format.
Thanks to Mike for the update. I’m looking forward to continued development of Ham Radio Deluxe.