[TenTec] Being a Contrarian...."

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 19:18 -0700, Grant Youngman wrote:
> > Doug Smith's leaving TT was NOT an 'urban myth'!
> 
> 
> But the notion that the Orion somehow died with him is.  Positively.
> Absurd.  Of course he left.  Last I heard he isn't the last living guy that
> knows stuff.  That he had the mojo and the rest is history -- that's the
> mythology, which has now become dogma.  If Gary B did do the Orion II
> single handedly (maybe that's just another piece of mythology), how many of
> the whiners (and I've been one, too, at times) could even come close?
> 
> Come to think of it, this whole series of threads is absurd.  
> 
> I don't understand why all the guys who think that they could do a better
> job, don't get together, throw in their savings accounts, and just build a
> radio.  Then we'll see.  Nothing is perfect for everyone.  Not the Orion, or
> the II, or the 7800 or the 9000 or ....  Nothing is perfect.
> 
> The whole business is just filling up disk space in my DELETED folder,
> including this useless contribution.
> 
> Grant/NQ5T
> 
I AM considering my own radio design. I need to solve some basic housing
issues (not for the radio, for me) first, but I've started by reading a
few books on DSP for communications design, and even bought one of them
for about $100.00 to have it handier than the local university library.
I've also downloaded most of the TI DSP design library for study.

There is more than one radio structure that can be used and the SDR1K
and Orion represent opposites. I think there is a better scheme, but I
have yet to prove its practical with enough dynamic range for HF ham
band use. In a one man show, it takes time to produce proven good code
and new hardware. I lean towards using an AMD or Intel Pentium style
processor because I can buy boards with CPU, I/O, and RAM far cheaper
than I can buy DSP boards and the later Pentium families do have DSP
instructions. That and I already have and use a compiler for them that
comes with a very fine debugger that may not be part of the tool kit for
the DSP chips. I can be very much more productive with existing hardware
than having to do ALL the hardware and software.
-- 
73, Jerry, K0CQ,
All content copyright Dr. Gerald N. Johnson, electrical engineer