[TenTec] Orion has arrived!!

[nq5t at attbi.com]

Well, it's here.  Going to take a while to get used to this.  But it plays 
well right out of the box, and is reasonably intuitive -- at least once I 
figured out that the "concentric" knobs are there for show, and it's a 
push button selection.  Naturally, my keys all have 1/4" plugs and 
the Orion requires 1/8".  And my external speakers have 1/8" plugs 
and the Orion requires 1/4".

A couple of things out of the box ... while I continue to pour over the 
manual ...

The VFO B knob is very tight while the A knob is nice and smooth.  
The B knob also doesn't rotate concentrically -- like something is 
bent, which may explain why it's tight.

The S-meter likes to periodically slam itself to the right hand stop.  
Haven't figured that out yet.  Don't detect severe noise spikes on the 
Orion or on other receivers when that happens.

The specs say there's an extra 10Khz extra coverage at the edges 
of each amateur band for MARS.  The VFO stops exactly at the 
upper and lower limits of each band -- with nothing extra (e.g. 7.000 
and 7.300).  I'm not happy that I can't use this radio for MARS, and 
need to keep another radio in line for that.  Maybe there's a menu 
option somewhere, but it wasn't immediately apparent ??  I hope 
this isn't one of those things there's no EPROM space to handle and 
it was just overlooked.

One last thing that was a bit disconcerting is that there's no "auto" 
adjustment of tuning step size depending on the rotation speed of 
the tuning knob.  Makes large excursions clumsy, and I have a 
feeling that step size selection is going to be something that gets 
used often enough, that the lettering on that pushbutton may not be 
long for this world.

Back to the radio and the book :-)

Grant