Simon Brown, HB9DRV, has sold the rights to his popular Ham Radio Deluxe software package to a group consisting of Mike Carper, WA9PIE, Randy Gawtry, K0CBH and Rick Ruhl, W4PC. All three principals have more than 25 years of experience with radio data communications. Rick Ruhl is the president of W4PC Software, Inc whose products include the PakRatt, PKTerm and Radio Operations Center software suites. Randy Gawtry is the president of Timewave Technology Inc whose products include the PK and DSP families of data controllers and other commercial data products. Mike Carper is an experienced Fortune 500 technology executive, educator and featured speaker in the areas of wireless technologies and IT Service Management.

“Simon has done a fantastic job with this software,” Carper said. “His vision for integrating rig control, rotor control, logging, digital modes, and satellite operations into a single integrated feature-rich software suite has captivated the ham radio community. We’d like to see this product continue in a way that respects the hard work put into this package by Simon and others, maintaining that vision, while delivering timely fixes and feature enhancements in the future, will be the number one priority.”

“After many years writing the Ham Radio Deluxe software it’s necessary to take a break and hand the whole project over to another team,” said Simon Brown, HB9DRV. “The support effort required has become more than I can realistically manage, with many thousands of users, new radios and other hardware appearing all the time and unexpected changes to the infrastructure used by Ham Radio Deluxe such as QRZ.com, I no longer have any time at all for other projects. As some of you will know, I have formed a company called SDR-RADIO.com GmbH and I am now working in the Software Defined Radio arena with RFspace. This is the technology of the future; a future I want a part of.  In 2012 I plan to return to England and get back on the air, something I haven’t done much during the last 25 years.”

The new owners are in the process of building a development environment for Ham Radio Deluxe and they plan to begin by addressing some of the bugs in the existing “To Do List” for an upcoming version 5.1 release. The 5.1 release will be made available at no charge to registered users when completed.