Another idea to consider, that is common these days, if the user interface of the equipment is not used every day is to configure the product with an RS232 port and allow the use of a notebook computer as the user interface for setups and more complex activities.

There is also a ready market for "off-lease" notebook computers these days too. For example it is possible to get quite nice IBM Thinkpad notebooks for about $230 US from resellers on eBay. I just bought one. The LCD screen is perfect, the keyboard is perfect and the processor is a 366 MHz Pentium. It will be used as part of a 1-UP test set I am building.

Michael Karas