[TenTec] Orion Bandscope

[ac5e at comcast.net]

The Orion's sweep really does not have the resolution to more than approximately indicate another stations RX bandwidth. An extra wide spike does indicate wide band SSB, wider means AM, and narrow is CW but that's about all. 

The sweep does "smear" a noise burst somewhat, making impulse noise look like transitory and fairly wideband signals. Noise bursts are not something I willingly listen to, so I try to ignore such. 

On the other hand, even quite a small but steady "spike" indicates a faily weak signal. With some practice you can easily find stations down to S1 or so, and even weaker on a quiet band. Right now, with the Orion on 7.009 and S3 to 4 QRN from the storm front that passed here last night I can see 8, no 9, weak CW stations and two quite strong ones on the lower 25 kHz of 40 Meters. Just being able to "take a look around" a band without spending a lot of time doing it makes it useful but it's not something that I use constantly. 

73  Pete Allen  AC5E

-
Never squat with your spurs on
>     I have been playing around with the bandscope to observe its operation.  
> Thus far, it doesn't seem too useful for much except locating signals on the 
> bands.  I was interested to see if I could determine a SSB signal's bandwidth 
> with it, but it doesn't look like you can do that very easily.  The display 
> seems like it is dominated by the band noise and its response is very slow.  Am 
> I missing something here?
> 
>     How do the rest of you use the bandscope?
> 
>         73,
> 
>         Bernard, WA4OEJ
>