I have some questions for those who have Orion documentation, or know a
lot more about the Orion and may be able to confirm or deny a few of my
perhaps naive assumptions. Here are my naive assumptions:
1) Every oscillator in the Orion is either a DDS oscillator or a
digitally controlled PLL oscillator. So that data loaded into some DDS
or PLL circuit is what determines the output frequency of those oscillators.
2) The Orion is a firmware upgradeable radio.
If those two things are true, why is not the following so easy to do as
to be called trivial? I would think that one of the great cost savings
advantages of a firmware controlled radio would be that they could use
filters with a greater tolerance of center frequency, therefore making
fewer of the crystal filters coming off the production line rejects.
Shoot, even my Kenwood TS-440, bought in 1988, had some DIP switches
inside that I thought were used to move the BFO to just the right places
on the SSB TX filter skirts. Yes they have a lot of phase noise, but the
TX and RX frequency readout was always correct. That was seventeen years
ago. I know the Orion must be quieter and a better receiver, but is it
not also more flexible with respect to filter center frequencies that a
17 year old JA rig?
It's not that simple because Orion's firmware
expects the old 500 and 250 slots to use 9.000750
MHz center frequency instead of the 9.001500 MHz
the first bank filters use. The filters would
not be centered unless there were an internal
firmware change, and I doubt Ten-Tec would want
to do that since then the 500 and 250 slots would
not be IF centered. Good idea but the different
IF frequencies for the first versus second filter
banks would not allow it.
Just curious,
DE N6KB
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