4K TCL TV as Monitor Appendix

Ray - K6LJ

A while ago I viewed a thread like the title. I looked thru the thread and decided to purchase a TCL 49" Class (48.5" Diag.) 4K Ultra HD Roku LED LCD TV and TV mount from Costco. Found a $289 price while mostly the TV was running at about $329 on the web.
I mounted it and connected it to my HP Pavilion Laptop 17 in thru the HDMI port. The only issue was that my laptop computer vintage 2012 was only giving me 1920 x 1080. Lucky for me the computer was fairly hi end at the time and had 1 USB 3.0 port.
So even though it looked great when I moved stuff up to the screen it was still 1920 x 1080. Decided to do a search and found the following on Amazon.

This connects to the USB 3.0 port. Wow what a difference. Now I can get 3840 x 2160 and other combinations.

For those that look for a way to get 4k from a laptop this might be your answer. This picture of the screen does not do it justice. Hope this helps someone out there.



This is my New Shack / Man cave



And finally have the stuff out of the bedroom.

This pic was before putting the adapter on the computer

bahillen

Ray Looks like you made a big improvement in display and your shack. The same situation for a second screen was with my station. I found an LG refurbished 32 in monitor for $299 at Micro Center. Normally $479. I looked at monitors for a long time and found a deal. My personal limit was $300 because I wasn’t sure how it would increase the number of windows open in a screen. I tried a 42 inch TV but was disappointed because it was only 1920 by 1080. Also the video driver was on board **** up a lot of CPU resources. Talking to a number of techs at different BestBuy and Micro Center stores the opinion was that a high performance TV monitor would be good but a gaming computer monitor was a better choice. It seems computer monitor prices are not dropping as fast as 4K TVs. Came down to I only had to buy it once and if not happy with a specific TV, I would have to buy another some day. Same reason I bought a 6600 instead of the 6400 and have not been disappointed. I upgraded to a NVDIA graphics card and was a big improvement. Allowed 3 monitors too. Freed up my computer to process FT8 ant Flex processing. No more missed FT8 time slot decodes. Had considered buying a 32 inch 1080 monitor you can find for $180-200 but would not improve the minimum window size on the screen. The extra $100 improved functionality and screen utilization. I use the SmartSDR popout to configure rig control things on one screen and operating windows and panadapter windows front and center. 73 Bill W9JJB