I made my annual pilgrimage to the nearest Ham store (3 hours drive) and saw a bunch of very pretty equipment.
However, I'm not going to ditch my Elecraft gear any time soon. Touchscreens have some advantages, but there are a number of trade-offs. Reliability (I remember problems with the FTDX5000 displays), ruggedness , etc. Also seem to take more power to run the bells and whistles. There could be a couple of solutions to their use by sight-impaired Hams. One would be voice recognition software. Like Siri or Cortana - how about 'Ellie'? Development costs would be pretty steep and we all know how wonderful the voice recognition software can be... Another idea would be to use a 'Super' K-pod/K-nob and/or something like the Genovation keyboards (mentioned recently on the reflector). That would be a much more simple solution. It could have custom keycaps with Braille characters on them. Not too many, but maybe 12-24? That interface could be used on multiple radios (a bunch of speculation about that regarding the K-pod recently). USB or something else to plug in. I'm not wild about wireless as that's one more battery to deal with. BTW, Touchscreens don't necessarily need to be proprietary. I have a couple that are generic with my Beaglebone that seem to work ok. Nice toy but not necessary. Not sure how practical these ideas are... 73, Jim Jim Finan AB4AC Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone. Original Message From: Don Wilhelm Sent: Sunday, June 5, 2016 3:39 PM To: [email protected] Reply To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Elecraft] New products Lynn, Please tell us how a touchscreen interface can enhance usability for blind operators. Elecraft has made a commitment for such usability for all their radios with those blind operators particularly in mind. A GUI interface means nothing to those who cannot see it. 73, Don W3FPR On 6/5/2016 3:16 PM, Lynn W. Taylor, WB6UUT wrote: > A radio with only physical knobs and buttons severely limits future > upgradability, and leads to crazy button combinations to turn things > on and off that weren't even a dream when the radio was originally > released. > > Touch screens may not be always convenient, but they're much more > flexible than a silk-screened metal panel. > > I realize that knobs and buttons are a religion for some, but it's > really time to lighten up, folks. > > Either that or for Elecraft to release a rig with a whole bunch of > "empty" buttons and sell stickers to update the front panel when the > firmware grows to need them. > > On 6/5/2016 10:18 AM, Buddy Brannan wrote: >> Also, can we pllease, for the love of all that is holy, not do the >> touch screen GUI? At least, not an exclusively touch > > > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:[email protected] > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html > Message delivered to [email protected] > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected] ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
