[TenTec] Houston......Orion has Landed

[N0KHQ at aol.com]

Hello All,

Pulling into the driveway Thursday evening........there it sat on the front 
porch......a large white box from TT.

Getting myself and the large white box through the front door was a little 
bit of a challenge, but with a little grunting and twisting we finally made 
it..........my only thought was to get the new rig downstairs to the ham shack and 
unpacked before the wife got home.

My first impression was:

Man, this things heavy......I think the packing material weighs as much as 
the rig.

My next impression, after carefully unpacking, was:

Man, this things big.....where am I going to put it? It was obvious that the 
Orion was not going to fit in the space previously occupied by the 756Proll 
and Power Supply. But with a little ham ingenuity, I was able to gently place 
the Orion on the shelf above the TT Jupiter. Whew!

I had also ordered the "Orion Operations for Dummies" DVD, starring Scott 
(Hollywood) Robbins, produced by TT and directed by Ed W4ZSB, but somehow 
watching the DVD didn't seem real important to me right now.

Quickly hooking up the grounding, power and coax, I fired the beast up. (I 
reset the CPU just out of habit)
The rig sprang to life, the blinding light from the display seemed to fill 
the room. I noticed that the firmware was ver. 1.369, so my first task was to 
update to ver. 1.37. No issues were encountered during or after the 
update.........cool!

Since my operations are about 80% listening and 20% transmitting, I wasn't 
real concerned about the transmitter section of the Orion.

Today is Sunday, I've made, probably 6 or 7 contacts with the rig, most of my 
time has been dedicated to the operation of the receiver controls.

Man it sure is nice to use a rig that is user definable.

The Orion variable "NR" operates just as well as my "Hear it" DSP module, so 
that's out of line now and sitting on the bench......don't need it any more.

I finally took the time to watch the TT DVD. By the way, if you are an Orion 
owner, you may want to purchase the DVD.

The Roofing Filters in the first IF is a great idea.

The Programmable AGC works great.

The Band Scope is "near" real time. Good enough for me. To have a Band Scope 
that is "Real Time" signal analysis is heavily dependent on three factors, 
Programming, CPU Speed and Bus Speed. Unless you have one heck of a CPU, "real 
time" is difficult to achieve. I run a spectral analyzer on my PC (800mhz CPU 
and 100mhz bus) and its still not "Real Time" so, we can only get "close". And 
close is good enough.

The only thing that sticks out is 1. The "S" meter needs adjustment and 2. 
The "Monitor" volume needs to be cranked up.

I guess the above comments and observations are enough for right now, time to 
play.


73
John / N0KHQ / St. Louis

Always on 18.130

Antennas:

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