> I'm not sure about my feeling for these levels of adapting to the
> Orion but that is my impression for playing with one a few hours and
> pouring over the manual and reviews.
My impression is that you have pretty much hit the nail on the head.
There really are just a few new control concepts in the Orion, and those
seem to be the most difficult to figure out. But they get relatively simple
after playing with them for just a few minutes. It's playing with them that
will build confidence in what they do -- not so much just reading
someone's description of what they do. And of course, the control layout
is different than many radios, but it just takes USING the thing. The
whole business of what's a receiver, what's a VFO, etc. seem to be
confusing at first because it's a different system organization than most
people are used to.
You can turn the radio on out of the box and use it. But you won't get the
most out of it, and once you dig past tuning and volume you could end up
VERY confused (and start thinking it has problems) if you do not RTFM --
and keep it handy for a while.
The points that continually seem to cause the most confusion are the
AGC settings. But all it really takes is to LISTEN to the effects of
THRESHOLD or DELAY or HANG to get the hang of what it does, so to
speak. Same is true of RF gain, to an extent -- you will find it doesn't
quite behave in the way you're used to. This is one of those cases where
someone could write page after page of techo-babble about what does
what and how it works, but it's just hard to "get" until you adjust the
controls with signals on the band and LISTEN to what happens. It's new
-- we haven't had access to those system parameters in a radio before.
But aside from a few things of that sort, once the radio is set up, it's as
easy to run as any out there. And the roofing filter busines -- well it works
well in auto, and you don't even need to worry about it, or you can pick
the one you want.
I was fiddling with the new TAPS adjustment on the DSP filtering tonight,
and found that I could use a narrow roofing filter (1000HZ) and very
narrow DSP filter (800 hz plus/minus, with lots of PBT shift) on SSB
signals, and make them much more readable by just dropping the TAPS
setting a bit. This will take a lot more evaluation to see what the total
effect is on adjacent channel selectivity, but it's certainly an interesting
capability.
Grant/NQ5T
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