[TenTec] What's going on with the O2?

[Duane - N9DG]

--- Ed Cummins <edcummins at comcast.net> wrote:

> I am curious about the SDR 1000.  Since no
> hardware/software is ever done
> right forever as technology marches forward is this
> approach more
> reasonable/practical than the Ten Tec hardware/firmware
> route ?  

Depends. If your desires and needs are only for a radio that
is mostly traditional in how you use it and interface with it
as a user then yes the Orion will hold its "value" and
practicality just fine. On the other hand if you are thinking
of doing innovative things that haven't really been done
before or were very expensive to implement in the past using
old technology then no radios like the Orion aren't that
practical. The innovative things I'm speaking of are
panadapters, waterfalls, point and click tuning, tight
integration with the various "sound card modes", etc. In that
case then the SDR-1000 is clearly the more practical choice
and will hold its "value" much longer.

> Granted that both will suffer from obsolescence given time
> it seems that the
> Ten Tec route may be able to preserve more of your economic
> value.  Used
> TenTec rigs would have a depreciated value that I believe
> would be greater
> than that of a software defined rig.   That given the fully
> software defined
> rig may have more features and user adjustments than a
> hardware/firmware version.      

This has been largely untested in the ham radio market place
for used radios. The SDR-1000 is actually the first radio
that has set out to *really* take as much advantage of SDR
technology and concepts of any ham radio yet. The SDR based
Ten Tec radios and the few other competitors to them are for
the most part just refinements of the traditional radio
design approach. Great steps forward to be sure but still
rather limited in their overall capability and extendibility.
As such their used resale value seems to pretty much follow
the same pattern of just about any other of the more
traditional radios that preceded them. Time will tell how the
SDR-1000 resale values hold up over time, so far it's been
pretty good for the last 2 or so years of its existence,
however that's not a meaningful time span to draw any
definite conclusions though.

Increasingly as time goes on I suspect that it will be the
activity level of the software/firmware development efforts
and feature/function enhancements for a given radio's
hardware platform that will determine which of them will
become most popular and hold their resale values better. I've
seen plenty of evidence of that developing trend right here
on this reflector and elsewhere.   

Duane
N9DG



		
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