[TenTec] Help me Decide ??

[Rick Denney]

Douglas Shock writes...

> OK...everyone has an opinion. Atleast the other SDR company responds to
> product and customer needs.

For now. But it's still based on the energy of one or two guys, and I
can say from personal experience that maintaining that energy year
after year becomes difficult. Ten Tec's software management has
attracted some criticism, and some of it is probably deserved. But the
comparison is not completely fair: Ten Tec has turned the corner and
is not a company that lives or dies with the energy of the founder.
That other company still does. We may be hearing the same issues from
their owners in, say, 10 years.

In (long--run away now if reading pontification seems undesirable--)
response to Stuart's comments, there's a difference between
software-defined radios that depend on an operating system and
software-defined radios that are integrated with their own OS
services. A FlexRadio, for example, might become difficult to maintain
as the operating system under which it is hosted becomes increasingly
difficult to support.

But my Omni V, released in 1991, still depends on resident software. A
previous owner upgraded that software with Carl's V.9 product, but the
original V still would still do everything it ever did, relatively
unaffected by subsequent generations of software development. The Omni
VI includes DSP and control software as well, and each succeeding
generation of Ten Tec radio (and, of course, not just Ten Tec) has
included increasing amounts and power of software. Because the
software is integrated with its own OS services, though, it will not
be made obsolete just because a third-party OS has become obsolete.
This is also true with that other company.

What makes software no longer usable is one of several events: The
medium on which it is stored becomes unusable and cannot be replaced,
the OS under which it is hosted becomes obsolete and cannot be
replaced, the peripheral interfaces on which it depends are superseded
by other standards, and the user interface and functionality no longer
meets the needs of users. Software that uses hard disk storage and an
operating system are much more vulnerable to obsolescence than
software that depends only on being able to maintain interfaces to
peripheral components. For example, I hear that the flourescent
display on a Kenwood TS-2000 is no longer replaceable. If that display
dies, the radio dies with it, even if the software still works. A more
computer-oriented example: I'm trying to build a new low-power 12-volt
computer so that I don't have to depend on old and fault-prone
machines for field operations. One requirement is that it directly
support MS-DOS, because my club uses TR-Log. I have an old copy of
that OS on floppy disk, but I cannot even find a motherboard for my
new box that includes a floppy interface, and MS-DOS requires much
(non-standard) manipulation to boot from a USB floppy. So, I moved the
OS to a CD, but then I could not get it to recognize the
SATA-interface hard disk. I have installed it (quite successfully,
actually) on an IDE-interfaced compact-flash card, but that's not
exactly a mainstream approach.

Having the wherewithal within the industry to support software-based
systems is a question larger than one brand or another. We've gone
down that road partly because we now expect radios to be fully
integrated with other control systems. I suspect the radios will
survive a lot better than those interfaces and control systems. And
most of those are depending on the energy of individuals or the
collective interest of volunteers (or both), and I suspect we have yet
to learn just how tenuous that can be. A computer expert friend of
mine selected an Omni VII over a K3 precisely because Ten Tec seemed
to have a more broad-based capability as a company which he believes
means less requirements for testing by customers, while another friend
selected the just the reverse because he wanted to be closer to the
development and testing process. But with software-based systems,
customers will always be providing some testing, and the development
process that depends on volunteers will always be subject to loss of
interest or availability. It's a new world for the manufacturers as
much as for the users.

Rick, KR9D