[TenTec] Buying a New Orion

[Mark Erbaugh]

>          My Orion's firmware will be completely up to date
> in two years...or 10 years for that matter.

Reality check here, please.

Recently, TenTec announced the end of the Pegasus after only about 4.5 years
of production (the radio was introduced at the 1999 Dayton Hamvention, but
wasn't in production until August or so).  I suspect that we will see no
more firmware updates for the Pegasus. Last year, the only firmware update
for the Pegasus was to give us access to 60m, something that the N4PY
software already did without the update. There have been essentially no new
features for almost 2 years, meaning that we really only had updates for
about 2.5 years - no where near 10 years.

I'm not faulting TenTec in this decision. You can't really expect them to
continuually pour engineering resources into a project without a
corresponding revenue stream. Now that TT has ceased support for the
Pegasus, I hope that they will release the firmware source code to the
general ham public. I'm sure folks like Carl could add new features.

73,
Mark

P.S. I don't expect TT to release the firmware, but I can hope.