ERGO 3 radio control software came first. It was originally produced in 1997.

The picture, from our first web site, shows “ERGO 3” running on Windows NT. “ERGO controls leading short wave receivers and provides integrated support for radio listening.” Customers had been buying ERGO through mail order or Universal Radio for a few years. Among the radios initially supported were R8A, R8B, AR7030, NRD535 and HF-1000.

There were four main differences between ERGO 3 radio control software and the current version.

• Far fewer features. Even so, they included basic radio control, data, propagation and mapping.
• The program used a proprietary data format.
• The program’s functions were in separate windows.
• Each receiver needed a unique version of the software.

Moving Beyond ERGO 3 Radio Control Software

Among the many new features added in ERGO 4 were:

• A heavyweight database engine because data sets were getting larger.
• Drag and drop docking because separate program windows was looking old.
• Separate libraries for each receiver. As a result, it became much easier to add more receivers. And since all of these libraries have a standard interface, coding and testing are easier.
• And, because more and more customers were going online, we added program and propagation updates, as well as remote control.

The mapping and propagation modules are from the original code and remain in use. Mainly because they still work fine. Coastline data, provided by the CIA, was originally used to create the maps. (GIS was in the distant future.) The option to create an azimuthal-equidistant projection centered on your location is a unique feature. I had to learn how to do spherical geometry transformations.

The propagation module code was hand-crafted and bench marked against VOACAP and later, ICEPAC. The typical Pentium 100 MHz CPU of the day was not very fast at these calculations. Few users had math co-processors.

Two last points. First, distributing ERGO 3 radio control software back then required mailing six floppy disks. Remember them? Second, ERGO 1 and 2 were never publicly released. A small group of SWL friends tested these versions.