Ham radio deluxe on the IMac

[M3HTT]

Morning!

My PC recently died so I thought I'd try an IMac for a change. What I didn't think about at the time was all the software that wouldn't work on this very shiny new toy. I now know that I can run a program called Parallels which I can in turn then run windows in which could be a solution.
Has anybody ever done this? I'm thinking primarily of using HRD via an interface to my TS2000 which was easy with my old machine.

I see on Ebay that I can pick up an ex corporate PC for aroud £80 with a monitor, the Parallels software and XP will set me back around the same price. What to do!

Cheers

Tom

[2E0SGB]

I use Macs, but older than yours, a Powermac G5 dual 2.7 GHz and a Powerbook G4 1.5 GHz. They needed a horrible piece of software, virtual PC, to run Windows, so I never did. Your modern Mac is Intel processor based so doesn't have this limitation. I use a variety of Macs in my work as a tech for an Apple Authorised Service Provider.

If you want to use your iMac, a cheaper option is to install Windows via Apple's Bootcamp, this is supplied with the Mac. It creates an NTFS partition on the fly and sets up Windows on it. The only disadvantage here is that you need to reboot whenever you change between OS X and Windows. If your computer is normally used along side your amateur radio kit, I'd say go for using the iMac. If like me the home computer is away from the shack, it would be more economical and practical to use a used PC.

I'm just now putting a fresh Windows XP install on an old Dell Pentium 4 2.4 GHz PC a customer threw out when when upgrading to a Mac. Then I'll be installing the DX Labs suite of software, using Commander to control my Alinco DX-77, it's the only software I'm aware of that will run it. It's a shame HRD doesn't support Alinco. Much as I like Macs, this is the most practical and cost effective solution for me.

[2E0VZK]

I'm not a Mac person personally but I can recommend VirtualBox.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Its what we use on Windows to emulate Linux and Mac's, and its what Linux people use to emulate Windows and Macs. Its also available for Macs and I don't see any reason why you can't use it to emulate Windows and Linux.

Its reliable, easy to use and most importantly its free. Also quite a few of us have experience with it.

[M0RBD]

I have used Parallels myself at work and it has worked fine, and I as far I remember it supports direct access to the underlying hardware.

That said, as Dan pointed out Virtualbox is a good option and should work fine under OSX, I have not tested direct access to underlying hardware under OSX so I'm not entirely sure whether its fully supported or not ( You will need this in order to access serial ports etc... ), however direct hardware access works perfect under Linux with XP as guest.

In both cases you need plenty of RAM especially if the host OS is 64bit, any Intel core/core duo based mac should work fine here.

Another thing you need under OSX is a USB Serialport, as Mac lack builtin ones.
I got mine from Maplin, and they have worked fine under Tiger/Leopard using drivers from the chipset makers.