The Chinese are trying very hard to catch up with Kenwood in the accessibility department. Elecraft has accessibility for those of us who know CW. The others, all of them, wouldn't know the meaning of accessibility if it slapped them in the face. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kelvin Marsh" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Monday, December 31, 2012 3:00 PM Subject: Re: accessiblity of two yaesu radios 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 ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2805 / Virus Database: 2637/5981 - Release Date: 12/23/12 Internal Virus Database is out of date.