[TenTec] Discovery: No Open Wire Orion TWINCOM!

[Steve Ellington]

Haven't we seen enough rigs with coax connectors on the back? Wouldn't the
Onion look good with a large pair of white ceramic feedthru insulators on
top?

Steve Ellington N4LQ.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Duane Grotophorst" <n9dg@yahoo.com>
To: <tentec@contesting.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 11:09 PM
Subject: [TenTec] Discovery: No Open Wire Orion TWINCOM!



CAUTION: Contains humor

After seeing the links posted by Ken N9VV Wednesday I
quickly went to see what really new and cool info
would greet me there. I was immediately rewarded with
a wealth of new information that further expanded my
understanding of the underlying engineering design
approach and goals of the Orion. Interesting reading
indeed. I found the comment about the sub RX being
patterned after the Jupiter to be particularly
enlightening to me, the fact that they chose to
preserve not only the IF frequency scheme but the 2.5
KHz synthesizer tuning steps as well, made me go
"hmmm, ..... I wonder????". Am I the only one????

I was further enthralled with the discussion of the
primary synthesizer design concepts, some of it had a
familiar ring (but not phase noise) to it, as if I had
already read about here on this very reflector just a
few short weeks ago. I also found it intriguing the
main RX/TX's IF scheme frequency choices to be a bit
of a throwback to the multi conversion designs of
yesteryear. Anyone else ponder this aspect??? And the
last IF being a mere 14KHz I surely thought would have
generated some discussion here on the Ten Tec
reflector, as of today none, ..... curious. Especially
considering that many feel higher, more traditional IF
frequencies are inherently superior, surely Ten Tec
has severely blundered by sticking with an "audio"
frequency for the last IF?

As I read further I had to chuckle to myself that
having the multitude of roofing filters to choose from
would surely woo the "crystal filters are the best
thing ever, no DSP will ever be better than my crystal
filter" crowd. They can simply tell themselves
repeatedly that it is the crystal filters doing the
REAL filtering, and then willfully ignore the DSP
aspects. Hats off to Ten Tec for this brilliant
marketing ploy!!

Did anyone else find the comments about employing the
RF clipper/compressor approach to speech processing
interesting; I seemed to recall reading that
discussion here on the reflector in the past too. The
fact that it is being done inside the DSP algorithms
that generate the TX signal by using a "phasing"
method - WOW it blew my mind to think what all of this
truly represents!! I was then immediately thrown into
a conundrum pondering that the lowly 14Khz "audio" IF
as being capable of "RF" speech processing, .... I'm
sooooo confoozed.

At this point I had realized that antenna feedlines
weren't mentioned since an early paragraph that
discusses the antenna crosspoint switching matrix,
where-o-where could the discussion of open wire
feedlines be, or TWINCOM, could I have missed it
somehow? I re-read the page again, and again, still no
mention. By now I was getting really worried, I was
beginning to see RFI effects in my shack, .... I burnt
my lips - and I use coax, no wait, I'm not even
transmitting, .... uh oh.

So I then went to the Tower Talk Reflector, still no
TWINCOM. I then wondered if there could be some Orion
discussion on Tower Talk perhaps, since surely the
contesting.com folks got their reflectors crossed up -
nope, hmmm. I then went to look at the internal Orion
pix from last summer, still no open wire line to be
seen anywhere, what is a guy to do??  I then thought
"hey, maybe I should look for some horse hair in those
pictures instead", surely there would be some of that
left from earlier endless thrashings of the deceased
equine. Couldn't see it, I guess it must have all
blown away with all that hot air on this reflector.

Duane
N9DG
Cooling my jets....




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