[TenTec] re should i buy an orion

[CATFISHTWO@aol.com]

Perhaps the reason you could not get it to work in 45 minutes is that some  
one had screwed it up royaly before you got to it, and maybe it needed to go to 
 an operating capable set up before you got to play with it.  for  instance  
close the BW down to 0 and lock the rig on vfo2 and put it in cw  mode with 
the hi cut and low cut crossed up, and the power to 0,  etc.. this would give 
you a signal with 0 band width and no power and be  darned hard to fix with out 
unlocking the vfo and such. RESET time.
 
I took my orion out of the box, stuck it in the hole in the operating  
station plugged in power, antenna, ground and turned it on.  boot up took  about 20 
seconds, I pushed the 20 meter button , a spun the dial, keyed up and  made my 
first QSO. that was easy. 
 
 I played with it for a bit, and my friend and ten tec afficinaido  came by 
and we did a firm ware up grade, ( I knew we had to reset, upgrade and  the 
reset again so I looked in the manual for how to master reset.. I know that  is 
cheating but...) turned it back on and am still using it over a month  later. 
 
 I have actually only done 3 master resets other than those for up  grade.  I 
find most of my problem is that I really don't pay attention to  what I 
pushed in what order, and oops, but now I have my prefrences iset up in  the user1- 
user 2 buttons. 
 
 So if I get the band with smaller than the band pass or something  silly I 
use user 1 to go to my rag chew setup ( 50 watts, nice bassy mic and  widre 
band with tx and rx, or to user 2 which is narrower bandwidth, 65 watts  for the 
linear, higher pitch on tx voice and narrower filtering, and more DSP  for 
contesting and dx.  but it ain't that hard to use.
 
Folks it is really a pretty easy rig to use. A lot of the controls are  quite 
similar to my Icom - 756  and ste up quite easy.  they both have  band with 
and band pass tuning,  selectable RIT/XIT , main and sub  recievers and many 
other similar setups.  of all my rigs I can compare the  Orion to the 756  for 
ease of use. I do think the Orion has a much better  reciever and  a lot of the 
functions are produced in a radically different  fasjion, but end result is 
quite similar.
 
So go play with one, don't let it scare you, their is nothing short of  
hooking up the power backwards you cna do to really hurt this rig. Its a  keeper.
 
tom N6AJR
 
 
 
In a message dated 6/21/2005 11:54:18 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
k5uj at hotmail.com writes:


BTW,  as I've stated before, I tried to operate an Orion on phone at a TT  
hamfest for 45 minutes unsucessfully.  And I always thought I could  get any 
rig to at least transmit, without a manual.  Omni VI is still  my go-to cw 
rig.  Great front-end.

Moving on  now...