Interesting article, and I know it addresses only the receivers, but
sometimes it's just hard to keep quiet. I guess that with the current
state of the art in these high-end transceivers, it would be reasonable
to assume that the transmitter sections must reflect the same high level
of performance. Sadly, that's not the case. Specifically, the CW
waveforms generated by the FTDX-5000 that I owned and tested were simply
terrible. The actual elements transmitted bore no relationship to what
was heard in the sidetone when operating QSK mode. While the QST
reviewer accepted the Yaesu claim that units after the second run had
the problem corrected, that turned out not to be true and units from the
fifth run and later still had the problems in spades. Yaesu offered a
"fix", but owners had to pay shipping both ways to the west coast and
the turnaround time was measured in weeks. One fellow who had the fix
installed reported that he could no longer hear anything from the
receiver when operating QSK above 20 WPM.
My intent is not to complain about the 5000, but to point out that it's
not safe to make any assumptions about the quality of the transmitted
signal based on the ranking (or price) of the transceiver. I've
recorded the CW signal of both an FTDX-5000 and Orion II on a separate
receiver and analyzed the recordings with an editor. The Orion
waveforms are textbook and changing the CW rise/fall time in the menu
actually affects the resulting waveform as you'd hope. That was not the
case with the Yaesu. I am not a Tentec cultist and the Orion II is my
first Tentec transceiver. But, I've owned all three of the transceivers
mentioned in the article and to me there's no doubt about which is the
all-round best.
73, Floyd - K8AC
On 5/13/2012 5:50 AM, John K3GHH wrote:
Did list members notice the article recently mentioned in the ARRL
Contest Update? I haven't pored over it thoroughly, and am not
qualified really to understand it, but the FTDX5000D and K3 come out
on top; the Orion 2 is then said also to have "extremely high
performance," and the article's comparison table includes only these
three radios. Finally, the Perseus SDR is mentioned.
http://www.edn.com/article/521690-High_performance_HF_transceiver_design_A_ham_s_perspective.php
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