[Elecraft] N4PY software

[Vic Rosenthal]

I just bought a copy of the N4PY rig control software 
<http://www.ralabs.com/n4py/>.  The program was orginally written as a 
replacement for the TenTec Pegasus software, and costs $35.  This 
includes a year's worth of upgrades, and you can continue to get 
upgrades each year for $35.  There are currently 39 reviews on eham.net, 
all of which are 5's, so it apparently  is significantly better than the 
free TenTec software.

He has just recently added support for the K2, and I've not been excited 
about the free software available (I've tried a lot of it), so I decided 
that judging by the reaction of the TenTec crowd I could afford to 
gamble the $35.  This program is NOT shareware and has a serial number 
mechanism that prevents you from 'borrowing' a copy to try it out, so 
you basically pay your money on the assumption that you will find it 
useful (no, please -- I don't want to start a thread on this aspect of it).

I found it well-designed (with some idiosyncratic elements from a 
Windows programmer's point of view), it seems to work smoothly, has some 
very nice features not available elsewhere, and a lot of potential.  The 
K2 support is new as I mentioned, however, and there are a lot of things 
that could be added (for example, DSP control and other functions that 
need to be implemented by switch emulation commands).  I am not sure how 
hard this would be to do, since some of this stuff appears to be write-only!

The author releases regular updates which, judging by the history file, 
have added a lot of functionality.  Like any developer, he is responsive 
to his customer base, so the more K2 users he gets, the more likely he 
is to add K2 features.  He did say that his next update (March) will 
includes some new K2 features.

I guess my point is that I like this program and I would like to see 
more K2 users purchasing it so that the author will have an incentive to 
improve its K2 functionality!

-- 
73,
Vic, K2VCO
Fresno CA
http://www.qsl.net/k2vco