[TenTec] Choice of rigs for contests

[Grant Youngman]

> I'm not sure about my feeling for these levels of adapting to the
> Orion but that is my impression for playing with one a few hours and
> pouring over the manual and reviews.   

My impression is that you have pretty much hit the nail on the head.  

There really are just a few new control concepts in the Orion, and those 
seem to be the most difficult to figure out.  But they get  relatively simple 
after playing with them for just a few minutes.  It's playing with them that 
will build confidence in what they do -- not so much just reading 
someone's description of what they do.   And of course, the control layout 
is different than many radios, but it just takes USING the thing.  The 
whole business of what's a receiver, what's a VFO, etc. seem to be 
confusing at first because it's a different system organization than most 
people are used to.

You can turn the radio on out of the box and use it.  But you won't get the 
most out of it, and once you dig past tuning and volume you could end up 
VERY confused (and start thinking it has problems) if you do not RTFM -- 
and keep it handy for a while.

The points that continually seem to cause the most confusion are the 
AGC settings.  But all it really takes is to LISTEN to the effects of 
THRESHOLD or DELAY or HANG to get the hang of what it does, so to 
speak.  Same is true of RF gain, to an extent -- you will find it doesn't 
quite behave in the way you're used to.  This is one of those cases where 
someone could write page after page of techo-babble about what does 
what and how it works, but it's just hard to "get" until you adjust the 
controls with signals on the band and LISTEN to what happens.  It's new 
-- we haven't had access to those system parameters in a radio before.

But aside from a few things of that sort, once the radio is set up, it's as 
easy to run as any out there. And the roofing filter busines -- well it works 
well in auto, and you don't even need to worry about it, or you can pick 
the one you want.

I was fiddling with the new TAPS adjustment on the DSP filtering tonight, 
and found that I could use a narrow roofing filter (1000HZ) and very 
narrow DSP filter (800 hz plus/minus, with lots of PBT shift) on SSB 
signals, and make them much more readable by just dropping the TAPS 
setting a bit.  This will take a lot more evaluation to see what the total 
effect is on adjacent channel selectivity,  but it's certainly an interesting 
capability.

Grant/NQ5T