By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor

This week, Surfin’ visits a website that is the host for thousands of free software applications.

SourceForge warehouses free and open source software.

It has competitors, but SourceForge was the first to offer a free centralized location for developers to control and manage open source software development. SourceForge is the host for approximately one-third of a million open source projects including those in the ham radio realm.

Using the SourceForge search engine returns 117 “Amateur Radio” projects and 380 “ham radio” projects (as expected, there is some duplication in the results of those two searches). Searching on “radio” returns 1322 projects, but the majority of those projects are not related to ham radio, so you will have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

To narrow your search, the search engine has filters that allow you specify operating system, software category (such as communication, education, Internet, scientific/engineering and multimedia) and other useful filtering refinements.

There is a wide range of ham radio software available on SourceForge. You will find all the usual suspects and some you did not even suspect on the website. So go for it! 

By the way, a Surfin’ reader recently asked me for a program to replace HyperTerminal, which he used to “talk” to his AEA PK-900 multimode data controller for RTTY and packet. HyperTerminal had been jettisoned in Windows Vista and Windows 7, so I suggested PuTTY, a free open source application that you can find on SourceForge.

Until next time, Happy Independence Day and keep on surfin’!

Editor’s note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, seeks the unusual in radio. To contact Stan, send e-mail or add comments to the WA1LOU blog.