JTAlert and Ham Radio Deluxe

First of all I use JTAlert and JT65-HF-HB9HQX (both of which have kindly been given for free for the use of radio amateurs) as my method of transmitting JT65 modes.
I also use a paid for Ham Radio Deluxe Rig Control to operate my radio. I also use Ham Radio Deluxe Logbook to store contacts - I am a customer of HRDSoftwareLLC and this is well worth paying for. All was working well until the good people at HRD decided to incorporate a kill mechanism into their logbook software (version 6.3.0.435) which would kill the JTAlert.exe process.
The reason behind this was to protect their customers databases from being corrupted.

Essentially JTAlert when used with other JT65 software was being used to write the contact details directly to the HRD logbook database. HRD had found it was corrupting certain aspects of the database and numerous call tickets had been raised around the matter. So they took the drastic steps of preventing JTAlert from running when HRD logbook was running. I can understand the reasons behind this as they are a relatively small company and potentially could have been swamped with support calls to try to fix something that was not of their making.

Then there were various software updates to JTAlert after HRD had given the API details out publicly. This now means the current version of JTAlert (2.6.21 or greater) writes to the database via the API and is no longer corrupting the database.
Ham Radio Deluxe was updated (Version 6.3.0.439) to remove the kill mechanism and all is good again.

Reading between the lines it appears that the writer of the JTALert software and the developers of HRD initially were not in communication but now through an intermediary seem to have resolved their differences.

As it happened my particular setup never made use of JTALert to write to the database at all! JT65-HF-HB9HQX uses the API to write to the database without the use of JTALert. In fact the only reason I use JTAlert is to tell me what countries have been decoded and whether I need them for DXCC.

I have a paid for subscription to Ham Radio Deluxe and when the version came out with the kill mechanism it stopped my JTAlert from working so making me unhappy.

At the time of writing November 10 2015 I have the following software versions:

• JT65-HF HB9HQX Version 1.0 update 6
• JTAlert 2.6.22
• Ham Radio Deluxe Suite  Version 6.3.0.447

I'm so glad the toys are now back in the pram and the children are playing happily once again.