[TenTec] Orion V2.060b Comments

[Grant Youngman]

> There still seems to be "gain distribution" issues with this 
> release and a lot of gain is gone out of the system - making 
> it hard to get enough audio and still keep sound peeks from 
> overdriving the audio. Gain and AGC just don't seem to work 
> together correctly.

I spent some time yesterday evening running 2.060b and 2.038k side-by-side.
There is definitely something wrong with the gain picture in 2.060b, or if
"wrong" isn't the correct term, then certainly "different" than 2.038k.

Barely enough audio output to begin with on 2.060b.  I found that if I
engaged NR, even at level "1", output droped so far that there was not
enough headroom to make up the difference by cranking up the audio gain.
However, if I changed AGC from SLOW (set at 5/10dB) to Med or higher, the
gain would come back up most of the way.  So it's certainly more involved
than just not enough audio gain, and has something to do with overall
distribution, AGC, AGC interaction with NR, and whatever else. This was all
done in the SSB modes at around 3 Khz bandwidth on a noisy 75M, with the ear
being the most sophisticated measuring device utilized.

2.038k on the II behaves very differently, and does not exhibit this
behavior.  Otherwise, under the conditions described, I can't say I could
differentiate between the performance of the two radios.  There have been
some comments about raspy audio by numerous people, but that didn't seem to
be an issue that I could point my finger at.  An SX-115 sounded generally
"smoother" on the same signals, but I can't say the Orions sounded bad,
either.  Overall, it would be hard to complain.

Grant/NQ5T