I'de like to hear more on this subject. Probably what you will be told is
that the Omni's are optimized for the ham bands, having crystal
oscillators for the front-end mixer while the Paragon uses a PLL osc in
it's front end. The Omni advertisements claim an absence of "phase noise"
while the Paragon advertisements don't seem to mention much about phase
noise. So I don't know if anyone can actually hear the difference or not.
The Corsair was the last of their big rigs to use a PTO. Both the Omni and
Paragon use the digital encoder instead of the PTO. Late model Omni-5's
and Omni-6's have very smooth turning tuning knobs while the Paragons I've
used have stiffer turning knobs. This would probably be due to the type of
encoder mechanism used. These newer digital vfo's are much better in the
stability department and will last a lot longer without requiring
rebuilding as the old PTOs did.
Check on the filtering. I think the Paragon doesn't allow cascading
filters while the Omni's do. I could be wrong about this. Also, the Omni-6
has a few features, of questionable value, that the Paragon doesn't have
such as an internal keyer, auto notch, variable sidetone that follows the
offset and larger frequency display.
Of course, the Paragon has it all over the Omni when you want to recieve
the BBC on 9.5mhz!
I think the best solution is to have them both.
Steve Ellington N4LQ@IGLOU.COM Louisville, Ky
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