[TenTec] ORION BCI

[Eric Rosenberg]

I've been following the thread on BCI to the Orion with both interest 
and amusement.

I live in Washington, DC proper, 5.5 miles from a 50kw AM station 
operating at 1500 kHz (signal measured a -10 dBm with a lab-grade 
spectrum analyzer on my inverted-L), and another relatively high power 
AMer at 1260 kHz.

 From my roof I can see (and have photos of) all of Washington's TV 
(NTSC and HD) and FM broadcast towers, not to mention the plethora of 
US and foreign government, commercial and other  point-to-point 
transmitters and repeaters that operate into the microwave bands and 
seemingly beyond.

Regardless of the number and size of cavity filters, weak signal and 
amateur satellite operations are difficult (I used to operate on AO-13 
and to a lesser degree the pacsats) or impossible.

And the intermod/overload on 160 is pretty amazing, regardless of the 
radio I've used... be it Kenwood, Icom, Yaesu or Ten Tec.

For the past 5 years, I had an Omni-6+. For the past year, an Orion.

The solution? Well designed and built BCI filters.  I spent as lot of 
time researching what was available in the amateur radio 
world.  Neither the ICE filter (402X), W3NQN, Top 10 Devices or anyone 
else's worked for me.  In the end, I did find one, not (yet) 
commercially available filter that worked so well for me that I had my 
best score ever in the CQ 160 contest!  If and when it becomes 
available, I'll post information here on the reflector.

A great resource for locating the broadcast (AM, FM and TV) stations in 
your neighborhood is AMSTNS and TVFMSTNS by Bob Carpenter, 
W3OTC.  Bob's software was invaluable to me in identifying the local 
broadcasters to better understand who and where and to what degree the 
offending stations might be.  An overview of the software is available 
at http://users.erols.com/rcarpen/INFO0227.html while the latest 
versions of the software are available at 
http://home.earthlink.net/~lvehorn/   For best results follow the 
various links!

The bottom lines is that if you're close to a broadcaster and suffer 
from intermod and overload problems, don't blame it on the 
radio!  External filters are the only solution.

GL!

Eric W3DQ
Washington, DC



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