Hams like to play with different software to control their equipment, decode digital signals, record audio, operate contests or many other uses. If you are lucky, you might have a dedicated PC for your shack. Often, you must share your family or work laptop. A virtual machine lets you configure your ham applications in a special purpose computer which is separate from other uses. Here’s how.

A virtual machine is just a computer that runs in another computer. Each virtual machine, or VM, is a guest. Your main computer is the host. Guests can run a whole range of operating systems, including various versions of Windows and Linux. You can set up a guest to test or run different software in a way that is completely isolated from your main computer, the host.

In the past, people achieved this kind of isolation by installing multi-boot to different OS. Unfortunately, this mean having to re-boot your PC to move between operating systems. VM is a much cleaner solution, as you can access two different computers (your host and your guest) at the same time.

If you like experimenting and trying lots of different software, the idea of isolation is compelling. Few things are as frustrating as trying to recover a stable operating system after some bad software has gone awry. I run a few different VM with versions of Windows and Linux for experimenting “risk free”. In the past, I have also used VM to try out new versions of Windows before I installed them. This helped me completely avoid Windows 8 on a real PC!

My Ham Virtual Machine

In my shack, I run a Windows XP guest operating system in a VM, as shown in the picture. This guest is completely dedicated to my ham radio activities, including logging, decoding and contesting. It shows up in my main computer as a separate window. Or, if I choose, I can run my ham VM in “Unity” mode. In this case, the ham programs just show up as programs on the main computer desktop, but they remain completely isolated.

A VM can share certain system resources with the host computer. For example, it can access my local area network and shared drives. Even more important, it can use the serial ports (real or emulated) from the host computer. So, I have a things like USB adapters and microHAM controllers plugged into a USB hub. The guest VM can access these automatically. Also, you can run virtual audio cables to transfer sound between the guest and host machines.

Virtual machines are also a great way for hams with Macs to use Windows applications on their computer. And for Windows or Mac users to install and try Linux, or maybe run a radio-oriented distribution like Ubuntu for Hams.

There are several alternatives for running VM guests on your main computer. The two most popular are VMware Player and Virtual Box. If your main computer is a Mac, try Virtual Box. VMware Player is available for Windows and Linux hosts only. Installation is easy, and both programs have wizards for automatically installing a VM with a guest operating system, such as various flavors of Windows or Linux.

If you are about to retire an old computer, you can also migrate it into a virtual machine before it passes away. VMware has a converter for doing that. If you have a computer with some important software and files, creating a virtual machine is also a great way of backing up. You can then run your VM on pretty much any other computer if you need to. I still have a fifteen year old Windows 2000 desktop PC that I can run as a virtual machine.

There are really only two pre-requisites for running a VM. The first is to own a copy of the operating system that you want to use on the guest VM. The second is having a reasonably good computer for the host. VM software has some overhead and needs to grab some host system resources and memory. This is not a problem say on an i5 with 8GB RAM.

By the way, the new Windows 10 includes “virtual desktops” but this will not be the same as a virtual machine. Windows 10 provides a Task View, meaning that you can create customized presentations of your desktop work space. There is no separate VM or any kind of isolation, and no separate operating system. However, Task View does mean that you can set up a work desktop, a ham radio desktop, a game playing desktop, and switch between them. And this will should useful.

Give it a try and let me know what you do with your specialized ham radio virtual machine.