The forum owners don’t want to encourage self-fitting. For hearing aids as medical devices, only trained and certified people are supposed to do so. At the very least, it’s a gray area to do it yourself. And if you don’t carefully approach it with backups, etc., you could muck up your HA settings and not know how to undo what you’ve done-potentially harm your hearing if you crank too much power to your eardrums, etc. Also, in self-fitting you can’t do REM, so you lose any potential benefit there. The best situation might be to have an HCP who understands your desire to experiment and at least tolerates or humors your efforts and offers advice - might be hard to find such a person but paradoxically enough my audi, whom I found through buying my HA’s via TruHearing, has been pretty positive about a few relativelyl easy, minor tweaks that I made to her initial fit - change the experience level to ReSound’s version of a full “non-linear” fit and switching the fitting algorithm from ReSound’s Audiogram+ to the open source algorithm NAL-NL2 invented by the Australian National Labs.
If you’re interested, you should sign up for free-to-audit Audiology Online courses and take those first. Powerful filter to find ReSound courses (switch OEM name in URL to find courses for other brands): Audiology CEUs | All Courses | AudiologyOnline. To find a link to fitting software, go to the DIY section via that CATEGORY, find the thread “DIY - Self Programming, How to Find Fitting Software” and go to post #114 on Oct. 19th by menglxs (clicking on the link icon associated with each post shows you the # of a post). BTW, since about Smart Fit v1.7, the only way to update to a new version (for me) has been to download a complete copy of the new version. Besides doing a lot of learning on Audiology Online, looking for help in the DIY section, you’ll need to get a Noahlink Wireless on eBay. At the time I got mine it was $250 with $30 shipping from Korea but they may have gotten cheaper since then. And you need a Windows computer. Smart Fit only runs under Windows. There is an earlier HA communication device just called “Noahlink” - WRONG device. If you decide to give it a try, be sure to get the Noahlink Wireless and not anything else of similar name.