A good friend of mine is visually impaired.  We have worked together and he has been successful using a Kenwood TS-590 on HF (it has a strange mix of voice, Morse code, and tone beeps, but you can deal with it), and a desktop VHF rig with channels programmed (he detects channel  1 by a different beep tone, then counts clicks).

I wanted him to have a HT to use.  Sadly there are only a few with voice prompts.  The ubiquitous BaoFeng UV-5R, is one, but it is VERY easy to accidentally stumble into a mode you can’t  recover from if you can’t see.  I had heard that the Wouxun KG-UV9D(Plus) was another capable HT, a bit better designed than the UV-5R, and boasting voice prompts.

Since this is a Type 90 Approved Radio, I figured it would be very simple to program some channels, and disable everything else (commercial users aren’t allowed to adjust things from a keypad).  That task proved difficult as the radio has no obvious way to disable its very frustrating BAND function (half of the display is set to one band and the other half to another).  One can disable the keypad, but you are still left with a VHF on one half and a UHF on the other (or dual VHF if you want), but you can only select channels on one of  them (because the band button is disabled).  That says anything left on the other “unused” half of the display might open the squelch.

I worked around this by programming channel 100 to be 147.985 MHz, setting the power to low, and the squelch to max 9.

The real reason this became an issue, is that the voice prompts only work for a few things, not all of them.  It would be helpful to announce Band A (upper display) or Band B (lower display), or perhaps use a higher beep for A than B, but Wouxun didn’t think that through.

Please, please, please, for the love of everything sacred, radio vendors should spend more than 30 seconds thinking of how a visually impaired user would want to use your radios and realize that no amount of screen prompts will help someone get out of an unwanted situation if they can’t see.  Use voice prompts for everything or at least chose your beep frequencies so someone can hear what is going on.

My wife and I headed to our favorite park, Beavertail (US-2868) on Conanicut Island, RI,  to watch the Eclipse this afternoon.  We were too far to the east to enjoy totality, but we figured it would be fun to see 91% of the sun occluded.  The weather sort of cooperated, with thin high wispy clouds and a temperature in the low 50s.  But I didn’t quite plan on the stiff breeze blowing right off the water into our faces – I was shivering, especially my hands.

I figured that I could use this as an opportunity to try out my Elecraft KH1 and it’s built-in 41-inch whip antenna at a park.  Despite my trembling fingers, I managed to make ten QSOs between 2:15 and 3:09 PM, all of which were during part of the eclipse.  I was actually pleasantly surprised  that folks could even hear me, but they did with a few fills required and signal reports ranging from 539 to 599.  That completes another of my goals for 2024, by the way.

My view looking SSW from Beavertail – it was a nice early spring day but WINDY.

My Elecraft KH1 laying down on my chair. It was fairly easy to work 10 stations with the attached 41″ whip (and 13 foot counterpoise wire laying on the ground)

I had an ambitious set of goals for 2023:

• Teach a class (either Technician or CW Academy)
• Participate in 120+ CWTs for the CWops Gold Medal
• Build my QRP-Labs QDX Digital Transceiver
• Activate 10 new parks in CT or obtain award for hunting 1000 parks
• Obtain 50 States Parks on the Air award

I completed four of the five, only failing to build the QDX transceiver.  It sits on my desk and perhaps will come to life in 2024.  I did complete 145 CWTs (actually 146 but I forgot to submit a log for one of them).  I also taught a Technician class in the spring of 2023.  For POTA I did get the WAS award, and hunted more than 1000 parks.

For 2024, I think I’m going to dial things back a bit, but here we go:

• Hunt 1500+ POTA parks
• Do at least one activation with the Elecraft KH1 hand-held QRP rig
• Give a radio club presentation on solar power/batteries
• Compete in 120+ CWTs
• Wildcard (like finish the QDX or some other ham related project)