Re: [Orion] ORION PERFORMANCE

[Bill Tippett <btippett@alum.mit.edu>]

Hi Oms,

        Some CQ WW SSB experiences of other Orion owners:

K3ZO (2004 CQ WW SSB):
On the other hand, Murphy left operating conditions alone, and there was
absolutely no line noise on any band until about noon Sunday, and even
after that the new Orion seems to minimize the effect of what noise there
is on the bands.  Though I put in about 42 hours I felt much less fatigued
than usual and survived the weekend on only one cup of coffee.  Something
about the Orion's mysterious receive capabilities which lead to much less
in-contest frustration, which I will write about in more detail for the
Newsletter to make it up to Pete for turning him down on the propagation
article.

(From PVRC reflector...URL closed to the public)

K7EC (2004 CQ WW SSB):
I used my 7800 during the CQWW SSB contest and it worked fine.
However for the really weak signals that I could not quite make out
on the 7800(even with both receivers on in a simulated diversity
mode) I turned on my Ten Tec Orion, and found that its receiver was
so much quieter (less internally generated noise) that I could work
the really weak ones(Morocco and Ireland on my inverted V) with the
Orion receiver and the 200 watts from my 7800 driving the linear.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ic7800/message/1538

W4ZV (2003 CQ WW SSB):
This was my first contest using the Ten-Tec Orion and I must say I was very
impressed.  I cannot ever remember having such success in copying weak callers
the first time, with fewer than usual requests for repeats.  I'm not sure if
this was conditions or not, but I suspect it was partially due to Orion's
digital AGC which seems to do a good job of equalizing very weak signals in 
QSB.
 I set the RF Gain to 100% for the entire contest and almost never touched AF
Gain...which made operating much less tiring than continually riding the RF and
AF Gain controls as I normally had to do with the MP.  The hardware Noise
Blanker was also very effective in reducing white band noise at the beginning
and end of propagation...it very noticeably improved S/N for signals at the
noise floor and of course there weren't strong signals on the band at these
times to cause distortion problems.

http://lists.contesting.com/archives//html/3830/2003-10/msg00815.html

        I've won CQ WW SSB SOSB10 for the past 6 years, 4 using an MP
and 2 using Orion.  In the 2003 CQ WW SSB, I had the best number of
QSO's of all multi-multi's except K9NS who had 1910 QSO's versus my
1906.  This year I had the best claimed 10m score of all multi-multi's
including KC1XX, W3LPL and K9NS.  My 1862 QSO's exceeded the best
MM score (KC1XX) by 96 QSO's.  These stations all have much better
antenna systems than I use (e.g. KC1XX has ~72 total elements on 10
versus my small 18 element 3-stack).  I much prefer Orion to the MP
I used previously.

You wrote:
>Much more noisy - even with all very famous roofing filters
etc..
>Poor Pileups intelligibility.
>We never got the best position on AGC versus NR.
>So, due the fact that are many reports saying the contrary. What
is happening?

        IMHO, most of your comments indicate improper AGC settings.  If
you have not read it already, I would strongly recommend a very careful
reading of YT1NT's excellent summary here:

http://www.geocities.com/va3ttn/UsingOrionRX.pdf

You also cannot expect an operator unfamiliar with Orion to properly use
it without a little experience and training.  IMHO Ten-Tec's paper on
optimizing Orion's performance below is incorrect in several areas and the
above should be followed instead.

http://www.tentec.com/565optimize.htm

        Hope this is of some help to you.  I have only discussed Orion for
SSB, but it is even better on CW IMHO.

                                        73,  Bill  W4ZV


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