The beginning
As a HAM (radio amateur) I’m obligated to keep track of my made contacts on the air. There are a lot of logging programs available on internet to be able to build a log. One of the most comprehensive programs must be Ham Radio Deluxe written by Simon Brown, HB9DRV. Actually HRD is much more then just a logging program.

Central database for HRD
Most HAM’s do have more then one PC. At least I have. Sometimes I use my desktop PC to log contacts but when I’m on the road I rather like to use my laptop to log contacts. When I’m at the club I want to be able to use the local PC for logging purposes. As you can imagine all these local copies of HRD produce a local database on that computer. So your logbook is scattered all over these used PC’s. To fix this problem it is possible to let all these HRD’s talk to one single database. In this case a MySQL-database. Please read this post to configure such a setup.

Your HRD logbook online
When you have your central database it would be cool to show this on your website. If you’re running WordPress as content management software, then this plugin will help you. Installation instructions:

- Download the plugin (hrdlogbook.php);
- change $dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass, $dbname in top of plugin code to your values;
- create a directory called “hrdlogbook” in your plugin directory in your WordPress installation;
- put hrdlogbook.php in that directory;
- activate the HRD Logbook Online in your Plugin page in WordPress;
- make new page in WordPress and only paste “[ show_logbook ]” on the page.

Now your HRD logbook should be visible on this page of your blog. Check my logbook page here.