[TenTec] Featuring, and what goes into next releases

[John Henry]

TEN-TEC gets a lot of inputs on what should be in the next firmware release
for each rig. We review what the customers are asking for and try to take
them into account when we determine what existing or prior production rigs
to work on next. We take several items into consideration, impact to the
current owners, size constraints, performance constraints, etc. Sometimes,
something that seems simple to a user, may turn out to be a huge risk of
various times, that we may need to post pone it to a future release.
Or sometimes, decide that it is just too risky to do.

That is why sometimes people ask for certain requests that may never see
the light of day. A good example of this is MOX mode for the OMNI-VII. This
is actually a simple change, but, the areas the change has to go into would
affect so many time critical areas of the code, that I am not willing to
take that risk, just yet.

The top priority for my time (of course with occasional interruptions from
commercial and new product design meetings) has been to improve the
OMNI-VII Ethernet experience. Granted, I get tons of emails from customers
who state it is working perfectly well for them. There are still several
that it is not working as well for. During this development phase, the
decision was made to correct the impact that QRN / impulse noise had on the
AGC of several rigs. For the 565, I had help from an anonymous ham that was
able work with the 565 beta team and correct about 33 other items. The
result was the release we made a short time ago, and with it's success, I
did the same for the 566 that was just posted. I also added it to the
OMNI-VII in the 1.035h beta version that I also made public in the OMNI-VII
yahoo group files section. Hopefully the results will be positive and then
I can also do the same for the 599 and the 539. And no, I can't comment on
when those two will be made available yet.
All of these activities, also come at the same time that we are designing
new products that we will introduce next year and the year thereafter. All
items requested by customers, in one way or another.

In the meantime, back to the OMNI-VII Ethernet software.
As I said before, I won't comment on the high speed sweep for the OMNI-VII,
I myself am not working on it at the moment, but it is not cancelled.

I hope the above gives customers a little look inside some of the decisions
or inner-workings, etc., of TEN-TEC.

Thanks, and 73,
John Henry, KI4JPL
TEN-TEC Engineering