Let me see, there have been some other "gimmicks" over the
years such as:
SSB - ca. 1952 - Collins, Hallicrafters, Central Electronics
et al.
All solid state RX and low level TX ca. 1966 - SBE.
Factory QSK ca. 1971 - Ten Tec
Solid State 100W finals ca. 1973 Hallicrafters, Swan, Atlas,
Ten Tec.
Digital frequency displays ca. 1975 - just about everybody.
Synthesized VFO's ca. 1977 - CIR, Icom.
1st IF up conversion to VHF ca. 1978 - Drake.
RS232 control for radios ca. 1984 - Yaesu.
Built in automatic antenna tuners ca. 1985 - Kenwood.
Spectrum display/panadapter built into the radio ca. 1987 -
Icom.
DSP filtering/processing of RX audio ca. 1992 Ten Tec,
Kenwood.
DSP IF radios ca. 1995 - Kenwood.
100% PC controllable radio ca. 1998 - Kachina, Ten Tec.
Flash ROM firmware radio updates ca. 1999 - Ten Tec.
PC based SDR ca. 2003 - Flex Radio (Is this next big design
shift about to go mainstream??? - I would not bet against
it!).
Note : I won't claim this list to be especially accurate
chronologically or even who was truly "first" but it should
be somewhat representative for when/who the significant
design approaches to how our radios are now being built first
appeared.
To be sure each of these "gimmicks" turned mainstream design
features had their own set of warts and undesirable side
effects (sometimes pretty severe), but they do still
represent the significant design changes as to how our radios
are now being built.
Ham radio is littered with things that were thought to be
just "gimmicks" but are now instead the things that most hams
can't live without anymore, - should make you go "hmmm". We
are seeing yet another round of the same thing happening
today, this is a natural cycle that will never end (if it
ever does I'm out of ham radio).
Duane
N9DG
--- Jerry Volpe <kg6tt@tomorrowsweb.com> wrote:
>
> Binaural is not a gimmick but another way to solve a
> problem.... the
> problem of sorting through several CW signals at the same
> time. I think
> it was very forward thinking for the Ten-Tec engineer's to
> include this
> reception option in the Orion and I imagine they felt so
> too.
>
> 73,
>
> Jerry, KG6TT
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