Agreed, I did a DX-390 with nice BRIGHT- blue but lettering looked fuzzy at
that end of the spectrum to me.

Orange is best,
Remember high brightness LED have a narrow beam's and you dont have much
room to work with
Cut the lens off the LED + wet sand as close to the chip's as possible..
This gets the beam wide and diffused for better illumination in the LCD
display.
Tie in at the audio IC with a series resistor
I wish they would make radios and scanners with a motion sensor
illumination.

-Joe

"RHF" wrote in message
om...
"Michael" wrote in message
et...
"Conan Ford" wrote in message
3.159...
The whole point of radio backlights is to make the display visible in
the
dark. I noticed that there is a trend towards blue LED's, and this is
a
very bad idea. Degen's DE-1102 radio uses these, and also Radiolabs
has a
modified ATS-909 that uses a blue backlight. Grundig also has a
number of
products which appear to use blue backlighting or keyboard lighting.
I
imagine pretty much all future portables will be like this.

I have a DE-1102 myself, and I find that the backlight is pretty much
useless, as although it does allow me to see the display, the blue
light
kills my nightvision, and also the blue LED's used are rather dim
compared
to traditional orange LED's that could be used. I find that other
radios
I
have had, with orange lighting, are much easier to read in a hurry.
The
blue color is also closer to the black color of the LED lettering,
which
doesn't help.

An example of this tomfoolery:


http://www.radiolabs.com/images/prod...thumb_mask.gif
I don't know what other manufacturers are doing this, but I really
wish
they would stop. I guess this is what happens when design teams get
compromised by marketing.


---
swap "hotmail" and "com" to reply by email.

I have the KA-1102 and I kinda like the blue backlight. I too don't
think
it is as optically affective as amber backlighting, but it sure looks
neet
:-)

Perhaps a radio manufacturer needs to do what The Ford Motor Company is
going to do about backlighting. On the 2005 Musang, there is going to
be a
color configurable backlight for the dash instruments. You will be able
to
adjust it via a control button to mix and match color tones to create up
to
as many as 125 different colors of backlights. LOL....

So.... How about it ???? A 7600gr or YB-400 with mix and match
backlighting
up to 125 colors ???

Michael

Michael - Kiss your Radio's Battery Life Good Bye ! ~ RHF

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