Thursday, September 3, 2009

HRD + DM780 v5.0 beta

With this last build, DM780 v5.0 beta build 2311, we finally have a stable build of what is likely to become the standard by which amateur radio multimode decoders will be judged.  Digital Master lacks a few items that would push it in to the rare air of classic programs.  The most notable is that it's macro facilities are bereft of rig control features as basic as changing the frequency, and without these basic building blocks, it can never be called a true scripting language. Of course, you can control when it stops transmitting, but the term macro is used, where I would simply call them templates.  They can be set to transmit upon execution, and have all the usual tag fields for both parties of a QSO. You also get access to some log and time information, and some specialized primitives that purport to give the other party a relevant IMD and S/N, but they are poorly implemented, and don't appear to sample appropriately the other parties tx, so they frequently give IMD's that are to high, and infrequently, simply punt, and print the primitive <imd> to your QSO party; it's embarrassing to print IMD <imd>. If they can't get it right, then at least make it a tag, so that you can manually fill it in when you know you've seen a long period of unmodulated signal, and noted the minimum IMD.