Most modern radios have menu systems that produce headaches. The signals of interest have often moved on by the time we get to the menu adjustment that would have improved reception on the desired signal.
The very best solution will be for fully programmable menus that can be configured *easily* to the user's own preferences, and placed on "quick-keys" on a touch screen or soft keys adjacent to the screen if the user prefers that.
The manufacturers who evolve to that user interface will be the ones who get the most market share, IMHO. The present crop of menu driven radios is so bad compared to their knobbed ancestors that it makes me wonder how hams can stand using them.
The performance of most mid and upper level radios is approaching the point of perfection, but adjusting the radio easily and quickly to make use of that performance potential takes so long and is so ambiguous that the effort is often wasted. It is even possible to erode the performance very badly by mis-adjustment of these often arcane menu settings. It would be like having 32 menu items in nested menus on a touch screen to make your car's engine operate well
while you are driving. Car manufacturers learned to avoid those distractions 100 years ago.
But the newest crop of car and electronics designers don't care. They seem to have completely slept through their "ergonomics" and "human factors" classes in Industrial Design school. Or maybe these designers never even took those classes at all. And the result is the trash that they foist on us in the user interfaces of our new cars and electronic devices nowadays.
Apple is the lone exception. They design well. (and I say that as a very disappointed Windows8.1 and Windows10 user, an annoyed new car owner, and a cynical new HF radio shopper)
73, Ed
ps. my favourite Yaesu radio is my FT-847. Not a top end performer by any means, but so easy to adjust, easy to see what the various control settings are, and the receive audio was actually quite nice. If only Yaesu had given it a slightly better HF receiver and a bandscope, it would have been a nice HF-VHF-UHF radio for today's market. But then they replaced it with the FT-991/A and lost the nice user interface and the full duplex satellite capability.
