I agree that this V2 release for the Orion - V2.060b - has a lot of new changes
to like.
The "Split" indicator and Band-stacking Register IDs are a good ergonomic
improvement.
I ran some SSB tests of the "Signal Processing" with a friend tonight and got
very good reports on the audio quality all the way up to a 9 setting. He said
there was a "little echo" sound at 9 but clear and good quality audio (He knows
me well and knows how my voice sounds). The local power meter and his remote
S-Meter both indicated about a 3-4db increase in power from no processing to
processing at level 8 - but no "processed audio" sound. The V1.373b5 gets about
6-7dB of power improvement with no "compressed audio" sound. So there is still
some room for improvement in this area for SSB DX work - but good performance
in this release.
There is some "audio artifact" on the CW keying sidetone.
The "Monitor" audio seems improved. Checking it against my friend on the other
end of an SSB circuit it seemed to what he was hearing on the other end.
Previously it had some distortion which was not apparent on the other end of
the SSB circuit.
The AM receive is excellent! Opening up the bandwidth made a huge improvement!
The "Noise Reduction" does seem to be nicely improved when using it with SSB -
which is likely to be the best use of this feature. There seems to be very
little "attenuation" of the signal through level 8.
The QSK speed seems to have been improved in this release. I can copy a carrier
between code elements to about 27WPM and between characters up to 40WPM or
greater. Nice improvement.
All in all this seems like a real improved V2 release for the Orion. I plan to
run it for a while - first time I haven't gone directly back to V1.373b5 since
the early V2 beta testing. With a little more average power improvement on
Speech Processing and finding a way to keep signals taken out by the notch
filters from "pumping the AGC." and this could be the best release "ever" for
the Orion - from my usage perspective.
Thanks TEN-TEC!
73, Merle - W0EWM
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