[Elecraft] New products

[Jim Finan]

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: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
Reply To: donwilh at embarqmail.com
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
>
>
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