diskette

Chris Galfo's Apple II, HAM Application

In 1978, Dr. Christopher Galfo, released one of the first microcomputer applications for HAM radio.  With external hardware support, it allowed communication on the HAM bands with morse code and RTTY (radio teletype).

Soon after I got involved in HAM radio with vintage computers, I found out about this application, but I couldn't find documentation or copies of the program, itself.  After a bit of searching, I found contact information for a Christopher Galfo and contacted him directly.  I was lucky and it turned out to the right guy.  He told me that he sold about 2000 copies of the software shipped on both cassette tape and floppy.  As the software wasn't copy protected, he thought that there were likely to have been many bootleg copies made.  He still had floppies and documentation in storage

He didn't have a working Apple II, so he sent me copies of the documentation and a floppy with the software to see if I could rescue it.  We were lucky and were able to read the floppy and using ADT, I was able move a copy to a modern computer in DSK file format.  

Dr Galfo's Apple II HAM software

I scanned the documentation, and created a PDF file.    I tried using OCR technology, but because of the dot-matrix format that the original was printed with, the OCR results were incredibly bad.  I ended up manually retyping most of the contents of the document so there likely are some mistakes.  Formatting of the original was maintained as much as possible.  Some minor edits for readability were made.

Dr Galfo's Apple II HAM documentation

Chris Galfo told me that there is no commercial value, so feel free to distribute to other vintage computer enthusiasts.

I have yet to try the software with my radio, but will try it out at some point.


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