On Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:25:23 -1000, Ken Brown wrote:
>I do not agree that the K3 user interface is intuitive.
You must be a politician -- you omitted half of my statement and
changed it's meaning! :) What I said was that someone who has owned
a K2 would find the K3 intuitive. On the other hand, K3NA, a very
experienced operator who led the VP6DX expedition, had very early
production K3s. He reported that after a 15-20 minute briefing
session, all of his operators were having no trouble using the radios
well on the air in pileups.
The degree to which ANY user interface is intuitive depends strongly
on the experiences of the user. Apple computers have always been
widely alleged to have a very intuitive user interface. My experience
with computers began with an HP41 in the 70's, then CP/M followed by
DOS in the 80's, then OS/2, then Windoze. In the early 90s, I took on
a teaching assignment at Columbia College for a course on advance
acoustic measurement, and included as part of the course the use of
spreadsheets on both the Mac and Windoze platform. When I tried to
learn the Mac, I found it anything but intuitive.
Kewood, Yaesu, Icom, TenTec, and Elecraft have all developed DIFFERENT
user interfaces for their radios. That's a large part of why Icom
owners continue to buy Icom, Yaseu owners continue to buy Yaesu, etc.
All of the buttons and knobs on the K3 have two or three functions,
depending on whether you give them one short push, or a long push, or
even a very long push. The single "very long push" function is only
used to turn on the Diversity RX mode if you have the second RX
installed. The controls ARE labelled on the front panel using color
coding to indicate the short or long push. In the case of knobs that
serve more than one function, there are LEDs to indicate which
function. As with all the controls on modern radios, sometimes the
labels aren't easy for 70 year old eyes to read, but the K3 is better
than most.
73,
Jim K9YC
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