> And to then draw pictures of analog S meters on a tiny radio
> screen is just plain silly.
> Duane
> N9DG
>
Yes! Duane, that's so funny.
I have a theory on digital clocks. Whenever I see one, I have to imagine an
analog clock face to get a 'feel' for what time it is. Sometimes you don't need
to know that it's 7:38:17, but it may be very useful to know that you have
about twenty minutes left to get where you're going before you're late, and you
know this by merely glancing at the big hand. Digital clocks actually require
an extra translation cycle in my head to tell the time.
So think about this for a second... the typical ham says, I don't want S-meters
because they're pass?. I want graphics that *look* like analog S-meters because
they have more pizazz. A manufacturer does this because it's cheaper. But hams
just eat up "innovations" like this. They embrace and then prefer them. In the
limit, the virtual S-meter is preferred over the actual S-meter.
We now have radios with no controls whatsoever --the PC-controlled transceiver.
Big LCD displays with graphics of knobs, buttons, and readouts, and a mouse to
manipulate the controls. That's cool, but think about this for a second... the
typical ham says, I don't want to have to actually *turn* knobs on a front
panel, I'd rather use a mouse to turn the same knobs on a virtual front panel!
I'm not knocking it, I'm just laughing at ourselves. Of *course* it buys you
something to do it this way, but it's still funny.
Virtual reality is now preferable to actual reality. We are shortly going to
prefer to send virtual e-QSL cards than have to wait a week to receive an
actual postcard in the mail. At first the e-QSL is a welcome convenience, but
then later on, the actual QSL is demoted to superfluous, and then to inferior.
How much do you want to bet that in a few years, receiving actual QSL cards
will be regarded as a nuisance, or at the very least as the quaint custom of an
oddly traditional group of hams?
Of *course* virtuality buys you some things, but it adds a level of abstraction
in the process which, instead of merely tolerated, is embraced by hams. It's
preferred now. From here on out, all "innovation" in radio design is simply the
effort to make virtual reality more like what we had in the first place: actual
reality. Hence, our preference for color over black & white. Or our preference
for more "realistic" 3-D controls or lots of fonts. Or, my personal favorite:
the problem of boot time vs. instant-on.
Already, we have had this added level of abstraction in our hardware. For most
hams- and for some time now- repairing their own equipment is now out of the
question, thanks to surface mount technology, the complexity of circuits, etc.
At first, we tolerated the shift toward surface mount, and of *course* it
bought us miniaturization and more features, but now, it is preferred in the
sense that, if this rig measures 1/2" wider or taller, or if Brand X uses a
potentiometer instead of an optical encoder, then horrors!, that manufacturer
didn't do a good job. Smaller is always better, 256 filter bandwidths are
always better than 128, and 1 Hz tuning steps are always better than 10 Hz
steps (never mind that the 'tuning step' did not exist with analog VFOs).
Our hardware is harder to visualize. A PC board with resistors and transistors
might easily be identified as, say, a product detector, but a surface mount
board with a DSP chip doesn't necessarily connote the same. Unless you
understand the auto-correlation algorithm, you don't have an intuitive feel for
noise reduction, but even if you do, you can't identify the relevant inputs and
outputs by looking at a mother board full of flat packages. So we content
ourselves to discuss the relative merits of the location of this knob, or the
prominence of that logo, or the resolution of this display. But can you blame
us? What do we really have left to talk about?
As most of you know, an old gimmick of mine is to assign 'homework'. So here's
today's homework: Visit your local consumer electronics supermarket, and then
compare and contrast the current trend in boom box design to the current trend
in amateur radio transceiver ergonomics.
Al W6LX
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