I haven't given any sort of an update on mastering, if there
is such a thing, the Icom 7000 transceiver.  Some of my delay was
due to my surgery I have mentioned too many times already.  Plus,
I forgot some of what I had learned just simply due to my focus on
getting better, learning how to walk without falling, and doing
physical therapy.  Of course, my hands took a couple of weeks to
start thawing out enough so I could not only feel the buttons on
the radio again but even when that point came, about a week after
being home, my hands still took a few more weeks of improvement of
touch and feel in order to read Braille well enough to take notes
and make charts and reminders of menu structures and what button
and what beep belonged to what, when, and where.  When I felt up
to it, I began pushing more and bending that old learning curve
like a skinny fiberglass cane or a fiberglass spreader on a 6
element quad on a 60 foot boom at 150 feet in 180 mile an hour
wind.  Well, I got a little carried away there I guess.  My 20
meter 4 element beam on a 26 foot boom went through 110 MPH once
and survived but I doubt a quad of that size would have fared as
well.  Regardless, I was finally back in the old saddle again. 
Dad gummit if I didn't get things all screwed up more than once by
getting off into the wrong sub menu of a main menu of a sub menu
or something like that.  I mean, when your freaking radio only has
a VFO dial and two skinny knobs and everything else is made up of
flat little square buttons smaller than the average postage
stamp, and each one of those little squares has multiple features
and you press it, you can get your butt in the ringer mighty fast,
if you aren't careful, which I'm not much of the time, careful,
that is.  Yes, I am old enough to have grown up in the days we
still had an old crank flat roller clothes ringer.  Back to the
radio.  Thus, once, when my son and I together could not figure
out how I had lost 4 out of 5 memory banks, each capable of
holding 99 memories, I finally did a hard reset, deleting
everything which returned, thank God, everything back to the
default.  Good thing I didn't have all 500 plus memories
programmed.  I don't memorize that many frequencies in the first
place.  This mishap gave me a lot of learning experience as I
began reprogramming the radio.  Plus, as a result of doing the
very same thing again, this time I figured out how and why, all by
my lonesome, and got all the memories restored.  So I know now
what to do if suddenly only one memory bank will display.  To make
a long story short, that will be the day, I finally felt I had
learned enough to control the receiver without it getting away
from me during an on air contact.  As I reported earlier about
having to change a jumper wire in the MFJ 571 CW keyboard in order
to make it key the dad blame transmitter, I finally was off and
running.  I have already reported on the Dog X-ray I worked during
CQ Worldwide so I won't bore you by repeating all of that. 
However, for those who still believe you wouldn't own a radio that
confusing, and so difficult to operate casually, I just want you
to know how much I now agree with you.  Like old Wayne Green,
W2NSD, used to say, though, Never Say Die.  I always thought Wayne
was a nut and now I know why.  You remember?  He once said, and
not too many years ago either, that nothing new had been created
in ham radio since single side band.  Holy cow!  I immediately
counted more than a dozen in my head when I heard him make that
statement on the Art Bell show.

     So, it is this way.  This idea came to me automatically many
years ago when the touch tone telephone dial was invented.  No
fooling, I'm that old.  No, we didn't have a crank phone so I
ain't that old.  Anyhow, by the time I was about 16  years of age
and working DX on 10 meters every day, the old touch tone phone
was commonplace.  I used it for literally years before something
occurred to me one day.  I remember people's phone numbers by
shapes and patterns.  Yes, I am also a graphemic senithett, but if
I explain that, I'll definitely be off course so as I was saying,
using a touch tone dial, I remember people's phone numbers by
picturing their geographical shape, or pattern I have created, in
my mind.  Braille helps out a lot in this memorization technique,
too, but even if I didn't know Braille, memorization by shapes and
pictures, or patterns, is commonly used by the big guys who
memorize thousands of pages of the New York phone book and can
quote it back to you chapter and verse.  A few years ago, I picked
up my phone to dial a friend back in Omaha.  He had been dead for
a few years but I was calling a different friend who was alive. 
Nope.  I dialed, by just pattern memory recall, my dead friend's
home number.  He had Muscular Dystrophy and had been in a
wheelchair most of his life.  We had been close ham buddies and,
yes, I miss him a lot.  I wouldn't have my extra today, nor my
advanced before that, if Ron had not helped me study for the exams
over the air on 40 meters back in the late seventies.  Anyhow,
Ron's father, now in his early eighties, answered.  I instantly
recognized his voice and was shocked I had automatically dialed
the wrong number strictly by the pattern I remembered in my head. 
I talked to Ron's father and mother for awhile and hung up and
carefully, prior thought in mind, dialed the other guy's number I
had intended to dial.  No, silly, I can't remember every number
indefinitely this way; just the ones I normally dial and those,
obviously, that mean a lot to me.  So, what's all this have to do
with menu driven radios?  Glad you asked Bull Winkle.  No, I guess
it was Bull Winkle who used to say, "Hey, Rocky.  Watch me pull a
rabbit out of my hat."  Did I ever tell you my children hated
watching Rocky and Bull Winkle?  I forced them to watch, as they
grew up, for cultural reasons.  Plus, it was my all time favorite
kids cartoon growing up.  One day my oldest son, he was about 9 or
ten years of age, was grumping around as we were watching Bull
Winkle and I asked my son why he kept wanting to change channels
to other cartoon networks.  He mumbled and I kept pressing him
until he finally said, "Dad!  They are old black and white
cartoons.  We like color cartoons."  I nearly fell off my chair
laughing.  So, now that I have that out of my system, I have been
trying to say that I use a similar system of memorizing menu
structures as a blind person using a computer or a menu driven
radio, to name a couple of things.  What I do is picture a
graphical such as thinking of a chess or checkers board.  Main
menus are normally horizontal and sub menus vertical but it is
based upon the layout of the menu structure on how I go about
picturing it in my mind.  Some features, such as the various modes
in the Icom 7000 transceiver, cycle through by pressing a single
square key over and over again.  You can hear the changes of
receiver characteristics so you know which mode you stop on. 
Using the QSYer, on the other hand, allows you not only to cycle
through the available modes but on any given mode, if you can copy
CW, you can get a slow CW readout of upper side band as USB or
Frequency Modulation by getting a CW read out of FM and so on. 
Otherwise, you just punch the synthesizer button on the front of
the radio, or the pound key, or has key as they say in Britain,
twice and it reads out signal, frequency, and mode of operation. 
I use reverse CW and that is announced as CW Reverse by the
synthesizer if you are in that mode.  I do that so that I can tune
up the band and creep up on the signal rather then in the normal
CW mode whereby you tune and you are on the opposite side of the
pass band and you don't hear the signal coming because they are
on the other side of the pass band.  In my old Drake TR4
transceiver days, this didn't make a whole lot of difference
because the pass band filter was so wide and so weak, you could
even hear an s6 signal coming up as you tuned into it but the
newer radios have a lot better pass band filtering.

     So, I've said all this so far to lay ground for describing,
howbeit, briefly, yeh sure, just using the RIT, the Receiver
Incremental Tuning.

     As previously mentioned, the Icom 7000 only has, what can be
called, three knobs.  The VFO tuning knob, which is as large as
about any VFO knob we are used to seeing, and two multiple purpose
knobs that stick out of the left upper and lower left side of the
front panel.  By the way, as is so common with many new radios,
the whole front panel can be detached; leaving nothing but the
radio to steel if you are parked in a dark parking lot after
midnight.  Each of these skinny  knobs allow access to the menu
structures that control everything from crystal filter tuning,
vox, break in CW settings, dit to daw ratio for CW, memory setting
of various modes, channel entry for memorization purposes, speech
compression, power output setting, recording incoming signals,
setting DTMF tones, something I've never had an interest in, sub
tones, and about 50 other things including 25 minutes or recording
of incoming signals on any band and any mode for any reason.  Big
deal.  But it is something different to play with, that's for
sure.  So, for now, to access the RIT function, the lower left
knob is pressed and held for a second.  A beep sounds the second
you push it in and then almost immediately thereafter, a second
beep, which means you are in the RIT mode.  Across the bottom
front panel is a bracketed  set of functions smaller than most
postage stamps label Function key one through four.  There are
additionally two other keys but these are outside the function key
brackets at either end of the functions keys, and it sets them off
from current access to other features.  So, if you have any
sensitivity at all, your fingers can tell where F1 through F4 keys
are without labeling them.  Although, you could put Braille labels
one through four without a number sign on these keys if it would
make it easier.  I'm thinking about doing just that but haven't
done so as of yet.  So, once the skinny button is pressed in and
you hear the double beep, you press F1 to access the receiver RIT
which means, the transmitter stays on frequency and the receiver
can be tuned up and down the band 9.99 KHz before it runs out. 
When you are done working someone, pressing F3 until you hear a
rapid double beep resets the receiver to the transmit frequency
and you can, of course, if a signal is present, here it jump back
to the zero signal.  Pressing F1 again for one beep turns the RIT
off and pressing the protruding RIT skinny button once again
switches you back into either, channel memory so you can change
channels, or to crystal filtering tuning mode.  You can tell by
the beeps which functionality you are in.  Additionally, I have
learned, if you forget to turn F1 RIT receiver setting to off
before exiting, the doughnut control behind the little finger knob
sticking out will not change to other banks of memory channels so
you know you forgot to exit normally.  Just repeat the steps
quickly, check the doughnut skirt behind the finger knob and
you'll discover you are changing banks of channel memories and not
Hz by Hz as if tuning a CW or side band signal.  Complicated?  I
guess but it doesn't seem like it.  Yes, this same procedure is
used to split across whole bands using the VFO as the transmitter
stays put.  The F3 key caused the receiver to match the
transmitter no matter how far apart they are.  This is helpful
working across the band on 40 and 80 when working DX that might be
100 to 200 KHz from your transmit frequency.

Phil.
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