I have to confess that until a few weeks ago I had been thinking that if I
ever got 3 or 4K$ to spend on another rig I'd probably give one of the JA
rigs a try. I had been looking at the ProII and the 1000D. The reason is
that I'd been with Ten Tec for so long I figured that if I wanted to
intelligently discuss the competition I'd have to give one of them a try
first. Also, I was curious about the way the rest of the ham world lives.
I have never owned a hf JA rig. It's always been Hallicrafters, homebrew,
and Ten Tec with a Knight Kit in there somewhere. Then, I finally got
around to reading all the material I had accumulated on the Jupiter, Orion,
SDRs, and DSP. Boy, am I glad I didn't buy anything first. Here's the
impression I came away with:
I think we are going through a watershed period in HF transceiver
development and it's exciting to think about where it all might lead. I
think that it won't be long before everything designed and marketed before
1997 or 1998 will be viewed as obsolete. We took our baby steps with this
technology in the 1990s. It reminds me of when color tv first began to come
out but it wasn't very good. You had to adjust the tint and color all the
time, the CRTs were round, the TVs were these pieces of furniture that
weighed a ton and everything bled colors and looked like a bad day on drugs.
But 10 years later almost no one had a black and white tv because the
technology had vastly improved. My Omni is, in DSP terms, like an early
color TV. And with the programmable Jupiter and now the Orion, it is
starting to get really good.
What's coming up? I think transceivers are going to keep sounding more like
computers. Instead of DC to light band coverage at the tops of magazine
ads, we'll see clock speed and no./size of processors being hyped. In the
way Dell, Compaq, and others make a kind of generic pc box, perhaps
transceiver mfrs. will all make a few standard transceivers at different
price points with their identities associated more with software than
anything else. You might even buy a Kenwood box for example, and load it
with Ten Tec software. Or maybe software development will go the open
source route entirely. How would you like the option for a dual trace
scope, or SSTV on your front panel screen included in your software along
with today's spectrum display? It might be possible someday in a completely
programmable radio.
I'm not trying to put down all the analog gear out there (which is about 90%
of everything in service) and I fully intend to hang on to my Corsair II
until it's in my estate sale, but I'm also looking forward to what's coming
up while what I have eases gracefully into vintage boatanchorhood. I'm
pretty sure what my next rig is going to be unless the JAs get busy soon.
Anyone else have any predictions? Technologically, reports of our death are
greatly exaggerated.
73,
Rob Atkinson
K5UJ
k5uj@hotmail.com
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