HRD DM 780 hangs if "call sign lookup" is used

Ed_NZ1Q · December 2014

This is a workaround I developed for what seems to be a rare problem I had mid 2014. Recently another ham ran into the same situation and contacted me. I passed on my findings to him, which he successfully implemented. I wanted to post the info here incase anyone else ran into this issue:

"In DM-780 when a station's call is displayed in the receive window and I right click on the station's call sign and then select "callsign lookup" from the dropdown, DM-780 hangs with the waterfall frozen."

The original description is midway down the comments in the following post:

https://community.flexradio.com/flexradio/topics/smartsdr_ham_radio_deluxe_dm780_howto_setup_guide?t...

However, I did not post the workaround there. So I will include the workaround in this separate posting. I had also described this problem in a problem Ticket with HRD - we discussed the problem but ultimately they had no clue.

My Setup: PSK31 mode, HRD rig control, Logbook and DM-780 running (all 6.2.3.271)
Radio: FLEX 6500 with SmartSRD, SSRD CAT and DAX ( all 1.2.17.35)
PC: Two monitors with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 adapter. Four core Asus 64bit with Win 8.1

================ The workaround ===================

In HRD Logbook, click configure, go down the list and click Radio Pane.

In the Radio Pane Configuration window (click Connection Tab). The following settings have been used to correct the problem:

Address is "localhost" (selected with the button on left), no other entries in Address.

Port: 7809

Check Boxes: neither of the boxes are checked (all unchecked) - this is the change that I made to correct the problem. In other words we want to prevent the logbook from connecting to the rig control program. (See Note #1 below for further detail)

Update Speed: Normal

...and of course one would not click on the "connect" button.

Once I set all this as above, I closed the HRD programs and reopened them. The problem went away.

Note #1: In other words we want to prevent Logbook from connecting to Rig Control. Clicking Callsign Lookup or entering even just one character in the Callsign Lookup pane apparently attempts to communicate with HRD Rig Control or Logbook via the local host connection. Through experimentation I found the problem could be avoided by not having the Logbook program automatically connect to HRD Rig Control via localhost, and just let DM auto connect to localhost (default configuration for DM).

It seemed in my configuration, if both DM and logbook, which use localhost and the same port #, are communicating with rig control, DM and the other programs hang when HRD rig control is connected to the FLEX via the FLEX SmartCAT prog virtual port.