Should contest rules allow and act upon 599K QRM reports?

Saturday 4 July 2020

Yaesu FTDX101 review

I own an FTDX101D. Having owned and played with a lot of other transceivers, I am left with a sense of disappointment in the lack of ease of use (in particular) the lack of settings memories available on the 101. I feel that the designers of other transceivers have spent more time considering the owner experience and usability. After studying this, I have focussed down on several settings related to the scope on the 101 which are not remembered in the band-stack:

1) Spectrum Scope operation mode FIX/CENTER/CURSOR
2) FIX frequency
3) SPEED
4) SPAN
5) LEVEL

For instance, I set up the triple band-stack for CW/Data/SSB for the 10m band.

I like the following scope setting on CW
1) Spectrum Scope operation mode: FIX
2) FIX frequency: 28.000
3) SPEED: FAST3 (as I like to decode by eye)
4) SPAN: 50KHz
5) LEVEL: Effects of tight roofing filter (300Hz), and low span means high level gain required

I like the following scope settings on Data
1) Spectrum Scope operation mode: CENTER
2) FIX frequency: 28.074
3) SPEED: SLOW1 (As I like a longer period of history visible)
4) SPAN: 5KHz (In FT8 only 4KHz required)
5) LEVEL: Effects of tight roofing filter (300Hz), and low span means high level gain required

I like the following scope settings on SSB
1) Spectrum Scope operation mode: CURSOR
2) FIX frequency: 28.400 (If I change to FIX)
3) SPEED: FAST1 (As I like a medium period of history visible)
4) SPAN: 100KHz
5) LEVEL: Effects of wide roofing filter (3KHz), and high span means low level gain required

Unfortunately none of the above settings are remembered in the band-stack. This means that on each change of band (with the exception of FIX frequency) or band-stack, the previous settings of these parameters just pass through, meaning I have to manually alter all the above settings every time...very very tiresome! You'll recognise this failing if you've been using FIX in CW and you change the band-stack to SSB...the cursors fly off the screen and the scope is looking at the CW FIX frequency and the VFO is up in the SSB portion of the band....crazy!

By changing the band-stack to remember these extra parameters the ease of use factor will go through the roof (this will also work when changing band). 

Do you think remembering these parameters in the band-stack would be helpful to your usage case?

Doug GM0ELP/MM3T

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