[Orion] Orion II n blanker

[Chip Angle]

Hiya,

Having had my Orion II for better than a week now and having run it 
through many tests:

The hardware blanker works fine as like most blanker that work it 
produces distortion.  It blanks fine on power zap and arcing. 
Observe the spectrum scope and you will see a pretty good reduction 
of the noise in many cases with both the hardware and software 
blankers.

I run an out board homebrew hi level 6 meter transverter and suffer 
from extreeme power line interference 110% of the time.  I always run 
my FT1000D blanker at 100%.  This blanker works as good as the 
FT1000d blanker so far and that's about as good as they get.  Keep in 
mind that no blanker is perfect especially in such narrow bandwidths. 
The absolute best noise blanker I ever used was an old RCA blanker 
converted to 28 MHz.  It was 700 kHz wide and there are very few 
bands left today where you have power zap and can run 700 kHz of 
blanker bandwidth  (none) and we don't have radars nor power zap on 
xband.

73  Chip N6CA