Topband: Comments on the Orion in the CQ160 contest

[John Kaufmann]

I had my first extended operating time with the new Orion in the CQ160 contest this past weekend.  We had a two-radio multi-op setup at KC1XX, using K1GQ's new Orion as radio #2.  (I have an Orion of my own on order and expect to receive it by the end of the month).  We also had an IC-781 at the #1 position, side-by-side with the Orion, and I spent a lot of time on both radios this weekend.

As users have already stated before, it takes some time to get used to the Orion, although I think I learned much of it pretty quickly without even reading the owner's manual. It performed very well indeed with the exception of several mysterious "crashes" where the radio suddenly went dead and required power cycling to bring it back.
  
The AGC is one area which is really different from every other radio I'm familiar with and I'm not sure I've yet mastered the AGC setup.  As Orion users already know, there's a lot of programmability in the AGC parameters (threshold, hang time, decay rate).  I didn't like the default settings in either the fast or medium modes.  It seemed to "pump" or "pop" too much for my taste.  I found that adding a very small amount of hang time (.04 seconds) improved this a bit.  Also, I found the default AGC threshold setting was too low most of the time.  It had the effect of reducing the dynamic "depth" of the perceived audio, which sounded rather unnatural to me.  A low AGC threshold worked well when the ambient band noise was very low and signals were weak.  It seemed to make the Orion hear very weak signals better than the IC-781 during very quiet times, like after sunrise when the noise drops down a lot.  However, when the band was noisy, I was constantly fiddling with the thresho
 ld and increasing it well above the default setting.

I liked the variable bandwidth tuning quite well.  However, I didn't find much benefit going narrower than 200 or 250 Hz, with 300 Hz being just about right for picking weak signals out of a pile.  I used 500 Hz when tuning the band during search times.

I was hoping to get some experience with reception of weak signals side-by-side with strong signals.  Unfortunately the propagation did not cooperate for the most part.  With the exception of a few local signals, there really were no exceptionally strong signals on the band!  Outside of a few hours the second night, propagation was in the dumps up here most of the weekend. I kept checking to see if I had accidently switched in attenuation somewhere.  In last year's CQ160 contest, I noticed lots of clicky and trashy signals, but the band seemed much cleaner this year. However, I think it was the suppressed conditions because the IC-781 sounded just as clean as the Orion.  Whenever I heard trash in the 781, it was also there on the Orion.

Before the contest we did an informal listening test for transmit key clicks from the IC-781 vs. the Orion.  With the rise time set at 6 ms, the Orion was noticeably less clicky, although the 781 was not bad (certainly better than a stock MP).

K1GQ's Orion seemed to be a bit deficient in transmit output power.  I measured 80W maximum output on 160, which is not quite enough to drive the AL1200 to full power.  It remains to be seen if this is a defect in just GQ's radio.

There were some minor things I didn't like but these are not specific to 160m, so I'll skip them.  

I'm looking forward to my own Orion arriving shortly and perhaps I'll post more comments after I get some more air-time with it.

73, John W1FV