I completely agree with Ken K6MR! I rarely, if ever, touch the radio. I sometimes twirl the main VFO knobs, but frankly, out of habit.
90% of my interface is via the computer keyboard (N1MMLogger +. Oh, yes, I'm one of those "Durn Contesters!"). But there are very interesting things on the horizon. I had a very long talk with Tom Wagner, N1MM at the Dayton Contest Suite Friday night while Spurious Emissions played in the other room. He showed me his new Logger feature: I call it "Active Bandmap". It's a bandmap window that integrates live information from an Icom 7300 spectrum display and the spotting network data and displays it, dynamically, right on the logger screen. It integrates spots, signal strength and labels the pips with the callsign from spot data. I have a friend with a 7300 and will start playing with this feature next week (I have a repeater to install this week <sigh>). This, folks, is what I attempt to do on my P3 display (I do not have the VGA option, it doesn't do much for me). Marker A. Twist the P3 knob. Drop Marker A on a pip. Push the knob in. Call the station. Repeat. But don't do it as much as I want to as it takes my hands off the keyboard. I have *ALWAYS* wanted to be able to do this right on the N1MMLogger screen, under N1MMLogger *KEYBOARD* control (Shift Up Arrow/Shift Down Arrow. I'm not much of a mouser.). Tom has implemented the functionality EXACTLY as I envisioned it. But it currently works only on an Icom 7300 and, in the future, other similar Icom transceivers. (Yes, I know Flex rigs can do this: No I don't think their receivers and Maestro's touch screen workflow are not up to the challenge. yet.) I am aware that details towards the implementation of this functionality has been made known to Elecraft. Tom basically has developed an "API" that defines how to format serial data to create a similar display from any modern Panadaptor display equipped transceiver with serial or "faux" serial over USB communications capability. I would recommend that the contest ops among us (and others who like this kind of stuff) investigate this functionality in N1MMLogger + and see how it may improve your Search and Pounce workflow efficiency. I also *strongly* encourage Wayne and Eric and the Elecraft Product Managers to start down the road of implementing this functionality before Icom/Somebody else comes out with a radio that challenges K3's performance capability. 73 Lu Romero - W4LT Tampa, FL ______________________________________________________________ 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]
