[TenTec] Re TS850-ORION; and some more thougts about the current discussions..

[Ulrich Hilsinger]

Hello,

first of all thank you to everybody who sent me answers to my question 
concerning a possible comparison between the TS850 and the ORION.

Meanwhile, I've also been reading older discussions from this 
mailingliste, and of course the actual ones.

Some comments and questions therefor:

"warbling": Did someone ever recorded this warbling during tuning, so 
that people interested in buying an ORION can hear this ? (Same question 
for the klicking in QSK mode.).

Of course, one has to pay a certain price for the extremely high 
spectral purity of the oscillator. It's a general rule: the lower the 
noise, the lower the loop bandwidth. The lower the loop bandwidth, the 
slower the PLL. Of course, there is a big difference between using 
integer-N-synthesizers and fractional-N-synthesizers, too.
By the way, none of those problems occurs on my TS850 :-) - I hear no 
warbling, it's tuned in 10-Hz-steps, and per turn I tune 10 kHz... one 
key pushed, and I tune 1 kHz per turn...
Nevertheless, today during the DARC XMAS Contest, again I really wished 
to have a highly selective receiver such as that one in the ORION ... 
:-) And of course, the oscillator noise is not as low at the 850.


IP2: Some weeks ago, there was a discussion about the IP2 figures in the 
QST test report.
I think the reason for the constant IP2 could be, that IM2 products are 
generated before the amplifier. In addition, switching diodes used for 
the band filters are always in the signal path, a fact which can be a 
reason for a IP2 degradation. However, the measured value is not that 
bad... It is still good compared to some of the japanese toys. Where, I 
think, IP2 was much more important than for the ORION during the 
development (IP2 shouldn't be as important for the US market as for the 
EU market).


Happy Holidays to you all,
all the best for 2004,

Ulrich, DH0GHU
dh0ghu at dh0ghu.de
http://www.dh0ghu.de/