Top ten free Android apps that every broadcast engineer needs

I have been using my Android phone for about 7 months now.  During that period of time, I have found many useful applications and some not so useful ones.  This is a great time saver for technical people.  This list is by no means complete, I did not include any manufacturing or supplier applications like Digikey.  These are tools for the most part.  They are the applications that I have found that have made my life easier.  I focused on the free applications rather than endorse any paid applications.

This is a list of apps that I found most useful for radio engineering:

1. VNC Android. Great remote computer control application that will work with almost any version of VNC server.   For logging into servers and workstations to fix things remotely, great time/sleep/gas saver.
2. ElectroDroid. App has many electrical engineering calculators; Reactance, voltage divider, resistor ratio, resistor series-parallel, capacitor charge, ohm’s law, resistor of LED, LM317, voltage drop, and battery life.  Also includes resistor color codes, SMD resistor color codes, inductor color codes, various pin outs, wire ampacity tables.
3. Metrics Converter.  A general units converter for metric to standard measurements.
4. WiFi Analyzer.  Cool application that has a WiFi spectrum analyzer, shows all WiFi channels, signal strengths and router name.  Can show an * for open networks.
5. Kreac Calculator. A full featured scentific calculator, includes all trig functions, roots, pi, log, e, ln, 1/x, etc.  Very handy for some quick figuring on the fly.
6. RecForge audio recorder.  Can record .wav, .mp3 or .ogg in 8,11,22 or 44 KHz mono or stereo.  The audio can be stored in different folders and emailed.  Great for quick recordings that can be emailed back to the news room or studio.  Sound quality is as good as the microphone on the device.  My HTC mic sounds pretty good.
7. Google maps.  Great for finding things, satellite views, etc. Use Itouchmap via web browser to find coordinates of a location by taping a map.
8. Flashlight.  Self explanatory, three levels, good for emergency use, but I’d not use it regularly as a work light, it runs the battery down too quickly.
9. Audalyzer.  Small audio analyzer that works pretty well.  If something more is needed, professional versions are available for around $5.00.
10. Radar now.  Uses GPS location to generate moving weather radar picture.  This has come in handy when doing tower work during thunderstorm season.  Good for pulling tower crews or reassuring tower crews as needed.

Those are the free apps, there are many, many more available from the app store.  As far as iPhone apps go, I just don’t know because I have never owned one.