Storing Radio Operating Manauls on an Android Tablet

[KE6TDP]

This is one of those extremely obvious after-the-fact concepts. 
You can store your radio operating manuals on an Android tablet.
This is especially useful for the radios in your car.

A few days ago, I received a Nexus 7 as a birthday present. Since then I have been furiously experimenting with how to use it. While searching for possible books to read on the tablet, it occurred to me that the PDF versions of the radio operating manuals could also be stored on the tablet. Sure enough it worked. I did notice that the quality of the PDF image for the "old" radios was very poor versus the "new" radios. The radio manufactures, it would seem, are now providing higher quality PDF documents.

[KE5PPH]

Have you checked into "Google Drive"?  It allows cloud storage of your PDFs. Works on my NEXUS, very well.

[W9GB]

I have a collection of PDF manuals on my Apple "new" iPad (unnamed 3).

[TANAKASAN]

Same here, over the last year or so I have been downloading pdf versions of my radio books and a Kindle now replaces about three feet of shelf space. Experimental Methods in RF Design is a 55 Mb pdf and the full Mouser catalog is 242 Mb, it's remarkable what you can fit in there.

Tanakasan

[AB2RC]

Ditto on the Kindle mainly due to the insane long battery life.
I get about 10 days on a charge with the wifi/3g turned on and about a month if I leave them off.

The newer, better quality pdfs render much better than older ones that are just scanned versions of the original documents.

Alex/AB2RC

[K6LCS]

Manuals are loaded onto my Kobo and Kindle eReaders and Fire ...

I also have a bunch of my one-page cheat sheets loaded and ready to view, too. On the DOCS page at ...

http://www.k6lcs.com

... I have one-page .pdf cheat sheets for ...

KENWOOD Cheat Sheets
One-page programming guides for the TH-G71A, TH-F6A, TM-271A, TM-G707A, TH-D7A, TH-K2AT, and TM-D700. (106 kb .pdf)

ICOM HT Cheat Sheets
One-page programming guides for the IC-R20, IC-T2H, IC-T7H, IC-T81A, IC-T90, IC-V8, IC-U82, IC-V82, IC-W2, IC-W32, IC-Z1A. (631 kb .pdf)

ICOM Mobile Cheat Sheets
One-page programming guides for the IC-207H, IC-208H, IC-706, IC-706MKII, IC-706MKIIG, IC-910, IC-2100, IC-2720, IC-V8000. (590 kb .pdf)


Clint K6LCS
 

[KD4EBL]

I do the same, but I have loaded all of these on a free dropbox drive(www.dropbox.com). That way it syncs to my iphone, ipad, Ham laptop, work desktop and family PC. The manuals are where I need them. Nice thought on the kindle as I may add that to my go kit.

[AA4PB]

I wonder how all this electronic storage is going to pan out over the long term. I've got some 100 year old printed documents that I can still read. I've got some stuff on 5-1/4 floppies that is a little hard to access these days 

[AK4AV]

Amazon will automatically convert PDFs to the native Kindle format, and then send the file to your device.

Just E-mail the document to your Kindle's E-mail address with the word Convert in the subject line. It takes a few minutes to process and then if your Kindle is connected via Wi-Fi the converted doc will automatically download to it.

The process is often so smooth and fast that you may think nothing is happening. But check the Carousel for new files.

The success of the conversion depends on how the PDF is formatted. Some elaborately designed PDFs are hard to convert. For me it works well for technical and scientific publications.

It is possible to install and read PDFs on the Kindle without this service - just USB connect the Kindle to the PC and drop the PDFs in the Kindle's folder. But the conversion makes a better document overall, easier to read.

[KE6TDP]

Just experienced an immediate need for my camera manual. We are currently on a road trip and could not figure out how to configure the camera. When we got to the motel, I was able to download the manual.

The Nexus 7 has really been beneficial on the trip.

[K5UNX]

Something to think about is offline access on the tablet. Dropbox (unless you mark something a favorite) and other "cloud" based storage solutions are problematic without network access. Since you have a file browser on Android you can store PDF's in a folder somewhere and access them easily.  I have an iPad and found GoodReader to be super handy for storing PDF's on the device directly.

[KC4YJI]

I have all my manuals on both my tablet and phone.  Comes in handy when setting the clock in the truck twice a year, or changing a setting on the ht when out and about.