Hi,
I've recently had an FT-450 on the bench here, to write an accessibility
review for Active Elements. One of the big charities in the UK has bought
FT-450s for their blind members, and I was keen to take a look.
In my opinion, the fact it has a voice readout fitted as standard is fairly
misleading. The uninitiated will believe it is accessible.
I found the frequency readout did not read to the hundreds of kilohertz. It
would read 7.100.0. It was missing the last digit you need for standard
accuracy. OK, you could net with a station by ear, but you could never get
to 7.100.00 to run an exact rounded frequency yourself. There was no
keypad, compounding the problem.
The second niggle was that pressing the readout key, caused the RX to be
silent. The voice was so slow, it took 13 seconds to read.
I only evaluated the FT-450, not the FT-450D. Perhaps it has improved...
In contrast, I've also just had a few days with a FT-2000. OK, there is no
voice chip, but I could use this fairly happily through the CAT, including
using split and the second RX.
Best wishes, Kelvin Marsh - M0AID
Working to improve accessibility for radio amateurs with disabilities
www.active-elements.org
For accessibility evaluations of amateur equipment and MP3 manuals
-----Original Message-----
From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of John Miller
Sent: 31 December 2012 18:08
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: accessiblity of two yaesu radios
Yaesu never did care about accessibility, the 847 was a 1 off try at it and
had a lot of problems, and now they have the ft-450 which took one of my
sighted friends, with the manual almost 3 hours to figure out how to turn
the voice read out on at a special event so I could use the radio and I
still did not like the radio at all. The RIT/XIT knob on my ts-2000 is about
the size of the tuning dial on the FT-450, even the IC-706 has a bigger dial
than that. I was far from impressed. Sadly that's what a lot of the hospital
EOC's have in this area of the state, I suppose if you're not tuning around
it's OK, but I'd hate to have to sit there tuning around with it.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Thurman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2012 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: accessiblity of two yaesu radios
> yaesu walked away from accessible radios when they dropped the ft 847 =
> which is why I will not own another yaesu rig. also icon and ken wood =
> rigs seem to be more reliable in my opinion
> On Dec 30, 2012, at 1:29 PM, Bob Ray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Greetings, I already know about the wonders of the kenwood products =
> like
>> the TMV-71A but I have been asked if a person can use either the =
> FT-8900R or
>> VR-7R(b)? Any thoughts on these two radios would be appreciated.
>>=20
>> 73,
>>=20
>> Bob KD0BR
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