Howard Kaufman writes:
> ARaspberry Pie?
> How does that work better than apple or pumpkin?
> Sounds great with morning coffee!

It doesn't take as much dough as those other pies. Watch the
seeds in your teeth, however.

	Seriously, there seems to be a couple of general design
philosophies these days regarding computer interfaces.

	The Uniden scanners have one of the best serial
interfaces in that you can query the radio and get back all
kinds of information on the fly while you are using the radio.
You can read the display and operate most of the controls by
sending turse commands. You can set analog and digital coded
squelch codes and pretty well operate the scanner from your
computer.

	Kenwood's serial protocol is kind of similar to Uniden
but I haven't found as much information about the commands so
have not yet been able to program or dump the contents of the
channels.

	Icom requires you to do quite a bit more work to talk to
their rigs because of the way that data are encoded for
frequencies.

	Frequency digits are doen in reverse order using binary
coded decimal so you have to get the order right plus you have
to know where certain bits fall in to the scheme of things to
know what mode you are setting.

	The Wouxun systems use a memory map so it is good for
storing radio configurations including frequency, etc, but it is
a good thing that the buttons are accessible as you can not
easily run the radio and operate it digitally at the same time.
Maybe there is a way, but the standard programming cable kills
the speaker when it is plugged in to the radio.

	One thing I can say, this all beats having nothing at
all which is what we mostly had just a few years ago.

	I do not consider pressing buttons and counting and
hoping that I didn't miscount or the button didn't bounce
anything but the rock bottom of accessibility. You are just one
fat finger away from silently changing something one didn't mean
to change and then wondering for weeks how to get back to normal
again.

Martin