Yes, this release was worth the wait. The levels of cw keying sidetone
and spot tone are back in balance, and I find that a couple of obscure
bugs like "loss of audio on keydown when aux rx in AM mode" are fixed
so I can have the aux rx set to monitor WWV. The cw sidetone sounds
ok here, however.
As advertised, the QSK is improved, I really appreciate that, and the
band stacking register indicator is immediately useful.
I wonder if the AGC attack time has been tweaked, as band noise seems
less harsh - but maybe is it my imagination?
Bob NW8L
On 4/24/07, Merle Bone <merlebone@charter.net> wrote:
> 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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