[TenTec] Should I buy an Orion now or wait

[Toby Pennington]

What exactly is "cw signal  timebase jitter"?   Any relation to dead spots
or noise bursts?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Tippett" <btippett at alum.mit.edu>
To: <tentec at contesting.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 5:38 PM
Subject: [TenTec] Should I buy an Orion now or wait


> AB7YF wrote:
>
>      1) the DragonBall processor used by the Orion has been EOL'd
> (discontinued) by Freescale/Motorola. Does this imply that TT will be
> upgrading the Orion to another processor when their supply of
> DragonBall's runs out? or does it mean that an Orion+ or Orion II is on
> the horizon?
>
>      2) From what I've read about Orion it has the potential of being a
> truly awesome rig, but given the somewhat unstable nature of it's
> firmware etc. can it truly live up to it's potential in it's present
> incarnation? or will a hardware upgrade(s) be necessary to fix all of
> the little nits?
>
>          Harry, from what I understand of the objectives of
> the forthcoming version 2.0 firmware upgrade, it should
> address problems caused by internal communications between
> the main CPU and the two DSP processors.  These communications
> problems have apparently been the cause of instability in some
> functions (random lockups, CW signal timebase jitter, etc) and
> I doubt these problems were caused by an underpowered CPU.  I
> have no idea about the support life of the DragonBall is but
> it is likely years (maybe even decades) and not days or months.
> End-of-Life happens all the time in industry and yet the world
> still somehow manages to turn.
>
>          If you want a perfect rig, you will need to wait
> until you go where George W5YR (SK) recently went. Orion
> already IS an awesome rig, especially its strong-signal handling
> as consistently measured by ARRL, RSGB, W8JI and Sherwood.
>
>                                          73,  Bill  W4ZV
>
>
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