I went a looked at some other pieces of sofwtare for the 817 and to be
quite honest I do not understand why anyone would pay that much money
for programs that are to my mind awkward to use ... especially when we
have our own _homegrown_ software FTBasic by Bob Freeth available for a
mere $15.
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I started by downloading an unregsitered version in its demo mode when
it was 5 minutes at a time for up 5 days. I thought that was terrible
... I worte Bob ... two days later we had a 30 minute window in the
evaluation mode.
Someone suggested it would be nice to be able to import/export the
memory tables in CSV form, 3 days later we had a new version with that
feature.
Some said the memory should be able to handle the strange splits for
AO27/UO14 operation ... a day later we had that feature
I asked what about the Knewood radios and datafiles how about them. The
next day we had a conversion routine that would make CSV files out of
D7, D700, G707 memory bank files.
Oh by the way ... all thse features seem to work on the first try. I
think I rember one version in the last 6 thgat had a bug and he replaced
it in hours.
... does anyone see a pattern here???
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Truth be told I have one wish - cut and paste of single and blocks of
memory channels ... that is still to come ... meanwhile one can simply
Export to CSV, edit, cutting and pasting to your heart's delight, with
Wordpad, save it and IMPORT from CSV.
I now have about 75 channel combinations of local repeaters and simplex
channels programmed into my two D700's, two D7s and my FT817 ... so no
matter which radio my wife or I pickup the BARC repeater is always
channel 3, the RANV repeater channel 2, APRS is on channel 1 ... etc ...
now all I have to do is hand copy those channels into my TM261 which
doesn't have compute commands ... grrrrrrrrr <grin>
FTBasic really deserves a good look by all. Its an excellent program,
its not very expensive, and the author is highly responsive to our needs
and requests ... what more can you ask???
72 de brian, n1bq
