Tom Ogburn's note about the Acer wireless keyboard raises a number of valid
issues surrounding keyboard selection for contest logging.
I've personnally found that the size and shape of the keyboard has a major
impact on the ergonomics of the station layout. SO2R operating, in
particular, makes this even more critical. For a number of years, I was on
a quest for a space-conservative keyboard for contest logging, and settled
on some IBM keyboards that were, in essence, 101-key keyboards without
keypads. However, these had problems in that certain computers would treat
the keyboard as a 84-key model, then F11 and F12 would not work.
Ultimately, a bigger problem came to light. I use a 101-key keyboard on my
PC at work, and my main PC at home, so switching to a different layout for
logging was counter-intuitive. I suspected that the guest ops that come
for the multi efforts at my station would be in the same situation, so I've
settled on standard 101-key keyboards at K8CC.
Mini-keyboards are cool, but standardization has its advantages too. Its
bad enough having to switch back and forth between my laptop!
73,
Dave/K8CC
--
Submissions: na-user@contesting.com
Administrative requests: na-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
WWW: http://www.contesting.com/datom/
Questions: owner-na-user@contesting.com
|