Stereo Tool

I'm standing at the crossroads where I'm looking at replacing a 10+ year old VFO FM transmitter that drifts around like leaves in the breeze, as well as a rack full of 30+ year old processing gear, all of which has been running nonstop for years. The processing sounds decent how I have it tweaked, but I know it's going to start needing recapped anytime now, and the limiter (a Sampson) totally lacks peak clipping, thus I still have to keep the modulation down due to overshoots. I'm not looking to squash all the life out of the music, but I do need tighter control of peaks. Perhaps going the composite route may be overkill for my purposes and just the free version would be a vast improvement over the limiter I have now?

It's a Part 15 setup, so I don't really have a great budget to go with. I'm seriously considering the PCI Max 3000+ PC transmitter over all the Chinese derivatives out there as it has the best output filtering and ease of control. I'd like to know if anyone else here has used Stereo Tool to feed one of these with the composite output of ST. Ideally, I'd like to use one computer for the TX and the software processing, and if I can run RadioDJ on it too, that would be great and eliminate one more windows box I'd have to mess with.

I downloaded the free version last night to experiment with it on this PC. It's pretty evident it'll do the job as it stands.

I recommend full version of ST. Composite is really nice to have. You need to have good transmitter/exciter to achive nice and output. I can understand low budget but Composite inside ST is really worth it.
I also recommend separate PC for ST.

However, as usually, when you switch from "boxes" to "software processing" You might lose that joy of tuning things