[TenTec] The future of The Orion I

[W. Engelke]

I have had my Orion for about 5months, and have used it for many things - SSTV, contesting, CW, ragchewing, DXing, etc. I have had a few glitches, i.e., mysterious freeze-ups or unexpected behaviors. In about half of the cases, I discovered it was something I had done or an error I had made. After having read about a lot of glitch problems, I paid careful attention to grounding in the shack before installing the radio. The number of glitches that I thought were really due to problems with the radio itself have been few, i.e., perhaps 4 times in 5 months.

As a dyed-in-the-wool computer guy, I can easily understand how these can occur and be hard to track down if they are related to timing. I hate to beat on TT's programming staff a whole lot, because believe me, I have run into a lot of similar kinds of problems with software written by IBM, Boeing, Lockheed, Microsoft, Oracle, etc, that I have worked with in various projects.

Still the announcement of a follow-on product was a shock because it seemed to me the Orion was still a pretty new product. Alas that is not the case with electronics. I am a bit concerned about the O1 and its current owners for the follwing reasons:

1.  Will V2 really fix timing problems in the O1 chip, since it is a slower processor?

2.  I'd guess that the use of the DragonBall Super VZ for the O2 was made because this chip would have the same instruction set as the original processor, giving an easier implementation of V2.  Very reasonable. But a check of Freescale's web site seems to imply that they are about to discontinue the entire DragonBall line. (See http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MC68SZ328&nodeId=01J4Fs2973vL2v ). Wow- how about that - the O2's processor is obsolete and possibly discontinued before the first customer-ready O2 is sold.

I guess this is the hazard of basing so much of the radio on software; you're held hostage by whoever makes the processor chip. I wonder how long it will be before TT does like FlexRadio and offloads ALL the processing to a outboard computer. Just think, then, the software will be totally stable and reliable, just like Windows (!)...   Bill, AB4EJ