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Operating Instructions
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by wd5jnc on December 20, 2008
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I totaly agree that the manuals need serious improvement. Ths is Not limited to Yaesu, But is true for Icom and Kenwood. The Manual for the Ft 2000 is a monster and the one for the Icom 706mk2g is worse Kenwood I have no personal experance with, but a good friend of mine has lamented many times about his TS-2000 Operaters Manual.
I have seen adverts for "Quick referance cards " for several rigs and wonder if they are written more clearly than the OEM manuals. if so they would be worth the money.
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RE: Operating Instructions
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by kf7cg on December 24, 2008
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The manual for the FT-950 is fairly well written and th instructions are quite usable, but the complexity of the available function, and the sheer number of nearly identical but different functions gives the rig a long learning curve.
An instance of semi-redundant functions, there is a microphone equalizer with settings for both the speech processor and non-speech processor transmit modes. The settings of the two follow the same pattern but but must be set separately. You can't just set microphone equalization. I am glad to have both but it would be nice to clone one to another.
The same is true of many other options as described in the radio.
The manual is thick and complex because the radio is so multi-featured with little way of copying from one band/area to another.
KF7CG
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RE: Operating Instructions
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by KT8K on January 6, 2009
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Unfortunately, beyond simple language barriers, engineers are often not particularly good communicators, either because they sought this career because they liked dealing with designs and objects more than with people, because they spend the majority of their time with machines and concepts rather than communicating with people, or because the typical engineering education does not emphasize or build communications skills as well as it might. In spite of business trends in recent decades toward optimizing the customer's experience, engineers still have far too little contact with their end-use customers, and manual writers are often given only a specification describing technical details of a product, itself designed only to please the engineers who designed it. The alternative of having engineers work closely with customers, manual writers, and others who can truly optimize the product experience is rarely understood, let alone achieved. This is an unfortunate fact of life that does more harm to products and companies than a lot of more obvious factors.
Personally, I like my Tentec rigs, especially my old Tentec Argosy 515 and Argonaut 509. The controls are minimal and the functions are basic, but it's really hard to get lost operating them. The manuals are pretty good, too, from a user standpoint, but are rarely needed because the design was intuitive _from_the_user's_perspective_, something rarely seen today. My worst experiences have been with the small, Japanese-made, all-in-one rigs like the FT-857 (even when my eyes were better than they are now), but big boxes covered in multi-function knobs and buttons are little better.
There is certainly much room for improvement in radio controls and documentation design these days, and I have especially deep sympathies for non-English/non-Japanese speakers.
Best of luck & 73 de kt8k - Tim
(BTW, I am an award-winning technical writer and an experienced engineer, and am available to consult with any manufacturer who wants to outdo their competition in the important areas of product design and documentation.)
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Operating Instructions
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by K7NSW on May 25, 2011
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This article reminds me of why I bought a TenTec Omni 7 hf transceiver. In my experience and opinion TenTec products blow all of these described rigs 100% away on all issues raised in the article. Buy American and get the best. I do not know much about Elecraft rigs but I suspect I would be saying the same thing about them if I owned one. Buy American and get the best.
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