8-) I am now retired for 10 years and have decided to 'get back into' Ham radio. And yes I still have a ponytail, (which back then, a good 80% of professional broadcast engineers had) but have given up the pocket protector.

All of the major networks were my clients. I specialized in high performance UNIX computing, and storage, especially in the broadcast TV & Radio vertical markets. As background: I am a retired computer systems engineer having worked for IBM, DEC, COMPAQ, HP and EMC/Dell over my long career. I will probably use Logbook of the world. I am certain that if there are 5 amateurs who answer, there will be 6 or more different suggestions. I know asking such a broad set of question(s) is probably asking for trouble but all information is good as far as I am concerned. (a sH^%load of ground rods is NOT fun to drive down I am glad that task is behind me). Yesterday I just finished the ingress of coax to the house and the bonded grounding system to the various ground rods and a long run to the electrical service ground rods with ground rods about every 12 feet along the way.

BTW, just passed my General so the ham shack is being set up along with antennas, coax, ground bonding and you name it. Two mice? One for the laptop and the other for the transceiver display? One keyboard for the logging suite of software. one for the FTDX101MP direct attached to the transceiver and the other for the logging laptop and attached to it. The plan is to have two display screens active.

Advice on memory, disk space and anything else (like Windows OS support) would be graciously appreciated. This laptop would be 100% devoted only to the ham shack for logging. It appears the laptop would need at least 2 USB ports, wifi and bluetooth. Essentially I would use the laptop as a keyboard and USB hub. Do any of you here use the DXLab Suite of software? How well (easy and trouble free) does it integrate with the FTDX101 family of Yaesu transceivers? Also is there some other suite of software that I would be advised to consider BEFORE making a decision? I have to procure a laptop and would like to drive a larger monitor, so a laptop with a removable screen would be most desirable. That said, in looking around for logging software there seems to be a suite of software called DXLab which is Windows based. I am a long time MAC user so from what I gather, I am best advised to get a Windows laptop for logging and perhaps even control.

Free ham radio logging software for mac