[TenTec] Orion in CQ WW SSB

[Bill Tippett <btippett@alum.mit.edu>]

                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB

Call: W4ZV
Operator(s): W4ZV
Station: W4ZV

Class: SOSB/10 HP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs):

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:
   80:
   40:
   20:
   15:
   10: 1937    35      138
------------------------------
Total: 1937    35      138  Total Score = 965,513

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

10 meters was not bad considering the dire forecasts (the news media got it
wrong as usual)!  Although Friday night began very poorly, Saturday was quite
good to EU and Sunday was even better.  I had my sights set on >2K QSO's 
and >1M
points until the Sunday flare hit.  Asia was very poor here until a brief
opening near the end of the contest which netted several zone/country
multipliers.  I missed Zones 18, 23, 26, 29 and 40 which is about as good 
as one
could expect with the Aurora activity (29 should have been possible but I never
heard one).  I kept checking for the late afternoon over-the-pole opening to
high latitudes but I suppose the absorption was too high to allow it.

This was my first contest using the Ten-Tec Orion and I must say I was very
impressed.  I cannot ever remember having such success in copying weak callers
the first time, with fewer than usual requests for repeats.  I'm not sure if
this was conditions or not, but I suspect it was partially due to Orion's
digital AGC which seems to do a good job of equalizing very weak signals in 
QSB.
 I set the RF Gain to 100% for the entire contest and almost never touched AF
Gain...which made operating much less tiring than continually riding the RF and
AF Gain controls as I normally had to do with the MP.  The hardware Noise
Blanker was also very effective in reducing white band noise at the beginning
and end of propagation...it very noticeably improved S/N for signals at the
noise floor and of course there weren't strong signals on the band at these
times to cause distortion problems.

Passband noise also seemed lower which I attribute to less IMD products, and I
never heard anything that I could identify as IMD (this probably sounds like
noise on SSB so my guess is that is why passband noise seemed lower).  I always
used the 1800 Hz roofing filter and adjusted the DSP filter from 2000 to 
1700 Hz
depending on interference.  By adjusting Passband Tuning to +150 Hz and RX 
Audio
Equalization for more highs, I could copy quite well even down to 1600 Hz
bandwidths if necessary.

I did get a few reports of rough audio which I attribute to an apparent bug in
the most recent firmware release (1.365).  I've really not used my Orion 
much on
SSB until this contest so I did not have a good benchmark for how the audio
should sound normally.

There are still some rough edges to Orion but they are being addressed.  Bottom
line is I was VERY impressed with the front end in heavy SSB QRM and it will be
interesting to see how it performs in the CQ WW CW.  See you then!

73,  Bill  W4ZV


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