Moving to the New M1 Systems - What Works and What Doesn't

It seems there are several OMs here…

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I upgraded to an M1 this week and SpyderX works with no problems. I was running a really old version of the Spyder software so I had to upgrade the whole thing to be able to use Big Sur.

I was lucky they were running a sale on SpyderX a couple of months ago and bit the bullet and upgraded, these things are expensive. I’d keep an eye out for a sale for Boxing Day maybe.

When calibrating, does it show the monitor? Both DisplayCAL and iProfiler don’t “find” monitors.

As in: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252067418

Is Fldigi broken on the M1 computer or on Big Sur? I’m still on an older iMac running Catalina as my main operating station with my Icom 7300 that I use for SSB and digital modes. If upgrading is going to prevent me from doing FT8, PSK31 (practically unused thanks to FT8), and JS8Call, then I’m not going to upgrade. (From KJ6TTR)

It seems both make problems. W1HKJ released a Big Sur version of fldigi: http://w1hkj.com/bigsur/

It’s not running on my M1, but right now, I don’t have an Intel Mac with Big Sur to test it. Maybe somebody can download it and check it.

Hold your horses…I am making some progress with Fldigi…

I installed it through MacPorts and…IT WORKS! :slight_smile: Installing through it gets current versions of the needed libraries (fltk, hamlib, libpng, libsamplerate, libsndfile, portaudio) and that did the trick. I guess W1HKJ will update the linked libraries in the released binaries.

So, where do we stand:

  • Fldigi is booting (
  • CAT control is driving me insane…right now I have a PL2303 CAT serial/USB cable and I can’t get it to communicate with the rig (unsigned drivers,…). I will look into this…
  • sound interface (SignaLink) is working. I expected this, since it’s a driverless external sound device.
  • Fldigi: everything crashed, so “IT WORKS” has to be interpreted as: it boots, it doesn’t crash, waterfall is showing. I didn’t do any QSOs and didn’t test QSO transfer to RUMlogNG.

So, the next issue I need to deal with is CAT. PL2303 might be a dead end, so I might change the chipset to FTDI. I guess I will know more in 1-2 weeks and hopefully also have the first QSOs.

As for WSJTX…at least I received some signals. With no CAT, I didn’t test sending and a full QSO…

Yes, this is a M1 Mac and BigSur:


Thanks for the update on this.

I got my wife a M1 Macbook Air for Christmas. For some reason, dragging epub files from a network drive and dropping them into the Books app does not add them to Books. We did the exact same action on my Intel Macbook Pro and it worked fine.

OWC Raid Enclosure, the Thunderbay 4 does not work and they say it might take a couple of months to get a production version of the SoftRaid software out the door.

Sucks that the fact that it does not work on the latest Mac Hardware is not mentioned anywhere on the product information.

Also the OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock connected to a M1 Mac mini randomly goes offline.

I waited on the phone for tech support for 90min before hanging up.

Want to get a new Dock, not sure if OWC is the way to go.

Any Recommendations?

I would love to get one with a 10gb port but to get a 10gb switch and adaptors for my PC and NAS I think that I would be looking at $1000 worth of network gear.

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Calibrating monitors is still not possible… There are hints, that maybe “in Q1/21” this will be solved. Apple, this really sucks!

I have been having problems with Google Drive (via Google Backup and Sync) giving recurrent errors and crashing on my M1 Air. I saw a thread somewhere that suggested Insync as a Google Drive client. I’ve found it to be rock solid and very quick. Syncing is as good as Dropbox for me and a much nicer app than Backup and Sync.

It also supports One Drive, though I haven’t tried it with that.

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I’ve got a QNAP TR-002 and that works. It’s perhaps not as fast as the Thunderbolt RAID boxes though. I don’t use the software, I used the DIP switches to set it up, though I set it up as single drives and access each individually.

Used iMovie for the first time on the M1 Mac and holy-smokes was it slow. Even the spinning beachball spun slowing (not kidding). Previously I used a MacBook Escape with 8 GB RAM and this M1 with 16 GB isn’t keeping up. Quite unexpected.

Also, battery life hasn’t been close to what I expected though I do spend a lot of time in Zoom meetings.

I’ve got the M1 Macmini. Bluetooth is one thing I’ve found that doesn’t work. I’m not able to connect my Bluetooth speaker, which I know works with my iPad, iPhone and Windows laptop.

Sorry for the late reply. My SpyderX does recognize my external Dell and the MacBook displays.

I use the X-Rite i1Display Pro and neither X1Profiler or DisplayCAL recognize monitors. Let’s see when the updates arrive. “1st Quarter 21” was announced.

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What is the purpose of calibrating monitors? In all of the years I’ve been using computers I’ve never heard of this.

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To have an end-to-end color managed workflow and not run into surprises when printing.

Very simple explanation: When going to a electronics store, did you notice the image of every monitor/TV is different, even when displaying the exact same picture/video? Some are warmer, some colder, some “bluer”, some “richer”, etc.

When calibrating/profiling a monitor you measure exactly how the monitor displays colors and brightness. That allows you to not only avoid getting color shifts, but (using printer ICC profiles) preview how a print would look on a certain printer/paper combination. You take the guesswork out of the equation.

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Screenflow has been updated and works.

Homebrew has been updated and works.

Pyenv won’t compile the latest Python, even though the latest Python works on M1. (My understanding is that there’s a fix in the works that hasn’t been released yet.)

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An update: if you install pyenv by cloning from the GitHub repository, then try installing Python 3.9.1, all is right with the world. :grin:

So far as I know, 3.9.0 isn’t compatible. At least, pyenv won’t compile it.