[TenTec] "End of an Era"

[Mark Kachel]

Bravo to the TenTec Omni VII, Orion II, Icom 7800 & Yaesu 9000. They are the last of the dinosaurs of this generation. They are in the same position as the Johnson's, National's, Hallicrafter's, Hammarlund's and others the day before Collins introduced the S line, way back when.

 

I've been looking at the Software Defined Radios. The SDR 1000 transceiver looks good. Some circuitry for a DC receiver feeding an analog to digital chip and an RF amplifier. Every thing else is software. Pretty impressive numbers. Cost with a new sound card is less than $2,000.

 

Then there is the SDR 14, basically a spectrum analyzer that can function as a general coverage receiver to 30MHz. The antenna is connected directly to the analog to digital chip. Might be nice to have some front end filters, but basically no RF parts. I'm not sure what the receiver's numbers are but I suspect with some tweaking of the software they would be better than anything on the market.

 

So who is going to be the next Collins and what will it look like? I think it will be the Elecraft K3

 

Mark, NØOKS