[TenTec] That's a great CW rig.....

[Steve Ellington]

Thinking back to the early 70's, TenTec had the first rig on the market with
true QSK at an affordable price. Shortly after that, Swan came out with
their Astro 102 which was strangely similar. The word got around and the
high speed cw boys gobbled up TT rigs by the hundreds. The imports didn't
catch on to the QSK game until the early late 80's with the TS-930, which
had excellent QSK. The other imports have yet to equal Kenwood in this
arena. Most have noisey keying relays, choppy characters and slow recovery.
As rigs became more complex, micro processors were introduced to control the
multitude of extra functions. QSK began to deteriorate even in TenTec rigs.
QSK speed and smoothness peaked with Omni-C and Corsair series and began to
decline with the Omni-V, Paragon and Omni-6. Some diehard cw ops were
disappointed with the Omni-6 and it's slightly slower recovery time,
tendency for clicky sounds when keying,  somewhat hard tail on the keying
waveform and slight frequency shift. There is a price to pay for "features".
Fortunately, some of the old QSK quality has returned in the Pegasus. It has
very smooth break-in with an absence of those clicky sounds in the speaker
and the waveform is text book quality. There is a bit of phase noise on the
transmitted signal but it is usually difficult to detect. Hopefully the
Jupiter will be even better.

Steve
N4LQ
----- Original Message -----
From: <jreber@es.com>
To: <tentec@contesting.com>
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 3:05 PM
Subject: [TenTec] That's a great CW rig.....




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