[Elecraft] Your thoughts on running SDR on a Mac

[Bayard Coolidge]

I know nothing about SDR, and I own a K3, not a KX3.

But I do have a 27 inch iMac running Mountain Lion, with Parallels 8 and
Windows 7 64bit Home Premium installed.

It was working beautifully with RMS Express, HRD, and the Elecraft utilities, etc.
...until yesterday (or late Tuesday), when I swallowed the latest update to Parallels
(build 8.0.18345), which has a bug in it that prevents Windows 7 from being able
to "see" the USB/Serial FTDI-based cables/chips properly and messes up the drivers.
The issue has been raised to Parallels support and a fix is in the works, I think. Someone
just posted a workaround on their user forum indicating that installing the FTDI driver
on Mac OS X and creating a serial port on the VM will work, but it's limited to two of them.

So, basically, I can't control the K3 using its serial port, nor can I use my Signalink USB,
for the time being. Yes, I need to spend a few hours pawing through my Time Machine
backups to find the most recent working .pvm file, etc., but it's time I don't have right now.

I allocate one CPU core and 4GB of memory to the Parallels virtual machine, and that's
given me very good performance (when it works!). One criterion for me is the time it
takes HRD to switch modes between, say, PSK31 and RTTY-45 - there is a pregnant pause
of several seconds on my Acer netbook (32 bit Atom processor at 1.66GHz, 2GB memory),
but barely a blink on the iMac. Startup times for HRD and RMS Express are also impressive.

Personally, I would recommend you stick with a Windows 7-based solution for your SDR
work until Windows 8 has been shaken out a bit - when you start adding layers of complexity
like this, it becomes difficult to troubleshoot as there are likely multiple problems/interactions.

HTH,
Brandy, N1HO