You should now have your audio connection made between the radio and the computer so it’s time to start configuring DM-780.
Now, let’s get started. DM-780 can be run as a standalone program, however, to take advantage of the many integrated features from Rig Control and Logbook, we recommend running the entire Ham Radio Deluxe suite.
Your Information
- Select Program Options from the Toolbar. This will bring up the Program Options window used to configure DM-780.
- Select Callsign (MyInfo) from the menu on the left side of the screen.
QSO Tag and My Station Set up
- Enter any additional information that you would like displayed. The center portion of this option contains information about you and your station used for substitution tags within DM-780 macro sets. We’ll discuss setting up the macro sets later on in the documentation, but for now, just type in all information under the QSO Tags section. Don’t worry about the lack of a SAVE button on this screen, your data is automatically saved when you exit this screen by clicking the red X in the upper right corner of the display.
- After you have entered the information in the QSO Tag portion, you will notice on the right side there is a button Edit My Station Direct. Clicking on this brings up the My Station data screen.
- Information in the My Station screen is used by Ham Radio Deluxe Logbook. If you have already set up the Logbook portion of the suite, this screen should be populated with the required information and you can just close it out and continue with the set up.
My Station Set Up
- Ham Radio Deluxe allows you to set up multiple QTH locations. This allows you to have a “Home” location as well as other locations such as a vacation home or favorite portable locations.
Multiple Callsigns
- If your License Manager shows more than one callsign such as for parent and child or husband and wife, you are able to enter station set up information for each callsign. You can also set up “Guest” accounts for club or special event stations.
- If you haven’t already set up the My Station data, in the Description field you see the word HOME for a profile of your Home QTH. This generates your main “location”. Then go ahead and fill in all the rest of the information for this location. Please note which fields are required if you use one of the DX Clusters.
- Most of the fields are self-explanatory. A couple of the fields do need a little explanation. The field SIG stands for Special Interest Group. This could be a club or any organization you belong to. The SIG Info field could be a website address for a group. You could leave these fields blank if you like.
- Another spot you might need help is once you enter your Locator, for example EN36QR, if you hit the little arrow that points downward, that will automatically fill in your Latitude and Longitude fields.
- By the same token, if you know your Latitude / Longitude, enter them and hit the upward pointing arrow to fill in your Locator.
- If you operate from mobile or maybe have a vacation home, you can generate My Station profiles for those locations as well by clicking on the Add Location button. You can copy the data from the Home location to be placed in an additional location then just edit anything that is to be different for that profile. Each profile is auto-saved when you exit the screen by clicking the red X in the upper right corner.
- Once you’ve completed configuring your Tags and My Station, your almost home. Just a couple more things before you can go on the air live with DM-780.
Soundcard Setup
- Now that we have our sound card interfaced to the radio and our personal information set up its time to start configuring DM-780 to receive some signals. The first thing we need to do is tell our software where the sound card for our digital operation is located.
- Click on Program Options, on the toolbar.
- Select the soundcard option.
- Locate the Input (Receive) device at the top of the options. There is a dropdown box where you select the input device on the sound card that receives the audio from the radio. In this illustration we are using the Microphone input from our USB external sound card.
- For the Output (Transmit) device, there is another drop-down box where you select to send the audio from the sound card to the radio. In this case, the Speakers of our external sound card is selected.
- Everything else should be left at DEFAULT for your system at this time. Just click the “X” in the upper right corner to exit the Program Options and your settings will be saved automatically.
- You should now be back to the Getting Started Screen in DM-780. To clear this window, let’s click on the “X” on the tab just to the right of where it says “Getting Started”. This tab is located just below the QSO and the SuperSweeper icons on the menu bar. Your screen should now look like the picture below.
