Don't get me wrong, I think Icom radios are, by 1995 standards, good kit. I have all the local freqencies that I am likely to want programmed in, and yes doing it on the ground either by hand, as I currently do, or from a computer is easy. But why in 2007 do they have a user interface from 1986..
I want a radio that can hold every frequency in the world along with it's ICAO identifier and it's human readable name all programmed in and accessible via an I-Pod type type single finger selector. There are only tens of thousands of radios and navaids, so all that data would fit into 8 MBytes of memory. When someone comes up with a radio with that sort of user interface, then finally aviation radio will have entered the 21st century. That's what bitches me off with ALL the current crop of aviation radios - in fact whilst I am on a rant, it is true of pretty well every piece of aviation electronics, including Garmin GPS sets and current crop of glass screen cockpits, they are all so difficult to use, the new Cessna glass screen C172 requires 5 hour familiarization training - someone has seriously missed the point, these things are supposed to make things easier. I feel better for that ;-) Pete > I have programmed manually, but I have the software for programming on > the PC. It is a simple task to just type in the freq you want. I use one > bank for local flying, one for a regular route I fly up north, and then > when I am planning a trip like the Gathering, I use one of the other 10 >
