I bought two radios during a mad phase. The only justification I’ll give is that they were quite cheap. They both turned up in the middle of last week and had languished, boxed, on my desk until yesterday apart from the batteries which I had charged. Yesterday, I bit the bullet and got on with setting them up.
There are two ways of setting hand held two way radios; programming them manually, which is slow and fiddly – I want to say cumbersome. For no other reason than it’s really nice to have multiple adjectives to emphasise how seriously annoying and frustrating doing it that way can be. But ’m not sure if cumbersome doesn’t have the same connotation as fiddly and is therefore a waste of effort. The other way is by plugging them into a computer which can create its own entirely different set of frustrations. I’m not really selling this am I?
Anyhow, as you might guess yesterdays efforts, where I started thinking it would be easy to programme them on the computer had me very close to throwing them out the window. It didn’t work, at all. Not one little bit. Nope. The prospect of them becoming UFOs was becoming increasingly more attractive. At the point of where they and the computer were in danger of taking flight I decided to have a go manually. What a wise decision that was most emphatically not. I won’t go into the detail of my dismal failure but successful it most assuredly did not come knocking at the door. I went to bed.
Tonight, I came back, sat at the computer, fired up the programme, plugged the radio in, clicked the upload button and off it went, doing exactly what it did not do last night. It was the same for both of them. They both did I it. Now, it was a little bit more intricate than that, but that is essentially what happened. So I can go out with a new radio tomorrow, and give it a go. See, wasn’t that easy?
Bills Posts 