[TenTec] Being A Contrarian

[Toby Pennington]

Buck K4IA wrote....

I thought the QST review was fairly negative.  A lot of "damning by  slight 
praise."  The overall tone of the review was negative with lots  of side 
remarks about shortcomings:
 
"it does so at the expense of certain features ... amateurs may well  have 
come to expect.
 
"hasn't addressed all the original Orion's shortcomings"
 
"falls short of the color screen implementations now commonplace  on 
competitor's products"
 
long discussion of a software crash that was fixed with 2.0b6
 
NR distortion - not as good as the original Orion (gee, where have we heard  
that before?)
 
complaints about the multi-knob to make adjustments
 
"Unfortunately TT made no effort to improve the band sweep and  metering"  
"Sweep has little or no practical value"
 
"No hint of an ALC function or measurement"
 
"Auto-notch ineffective under 230 hz"
 
But if you can make it to the end of the article without writing off the  
Orion II, they do conclude "the Orion II's performance will be a dream come 
true  
for many discriminating radio amateurs."
 
I thought the RSGB article was a lot more positive.  

k4ia
Craig  "Buck"
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Sometimes the truth about something can appear to be negative.  It was perhaps a bit nit-picking when describing the multiknob operation and also commenting about the ALC function measurement.  

However,  I feel it was time someone stepped up and gave the amateur community a heads up about the very real short comings in the Orion program........ problems of long standing which to this date still have not been addressed.  To this end I believe the reviewer was dead on with most of his comments both positive and negative.   

On a more positive note,  I am hearing about a new rig called the Omni VII of which there is apparently a prototype being demonstrated at certain meetings.  The information comes from a fairly reliable source,  but I am still not totally sure about the existence of this new rig.  Anyone else hear anything about this?

Toby  W4CAK