Duane, you make several good points.
Those of you who are tired of this thread, please delete it or filter it
out. There are many of us who are enjoying it. Tnx.
I guess if Ten-Tec or any other vendor were following this thread, they
would throw their hands up in the air and wonder how on earth they should
ever define the requirements for a new radio.
First, I think we (the active participants here) are not necessarily talking
about the same radio. Maybe we are defining 2 or 3 different radios at
once.
Let's keep in mind:
Each and every feature costs money, time and long-term extended effort.
Each time a new firmware release is released, it has hopefully been tested
to assure none of its changes negatively impact any of the tens of features
the radio has. The more features, the longer it takes to test (and the
higher the chance for interaction which takes longer to fix).
When the Orion originally came out, lots of people complained about the
price. Now, with the 7800, 9000 and PRO III, the complaints about the
Orion's price have subsided.
If you put all of Orion's features into this new radio we were talking
about, plus add more, then we're defining a successor for the Orion, not a
successor for the Omni.
Therefore, we all should be prepared to make a list of features we desire
and then specify how much money we think each feature is worth to us
(additional purchase price). For instance, I was told that Ten-Tec
estimated the additional cost (selling price) of a color display for the
Orion to be $400 (including the rewriting of ALL of the menu options to
include color attributes). I personally would never pay more than $100 for
a color display, though I would like to have one. I set my limit at $100
for it.
One year ago, we conducted an extended survey here in Europe to try and
define what transceiver needs people actually had. We asked them to specify
how much they were willing to pay for the bigger features (i.e., color
screen). Interesting, almost no one was willing to pay any money for the
color screen. For free, YES, but not if it costs money. The group targeted
by this survey was contesters who use their radios to make QSOs, not as an
experimental backplane for attaching gadgets. There were about 100
participants responding to the survey (BCC and RRDX club members). The
results (summary) were published on our BCC web page in German and in
English.
Perhaps someone here on this reflector would like to do something similar.
It is important to specify which radio people should design for.
In our case we were designing a contest transceiver.
If done correctly, the resulting information will be welcomed by the
vendors.
(new topic:)
I didn't mean in my previous email that Ten-Tec should keep the Omni VI
design when designing an Omni VII. I'll let Ten-Tec do the design work; I
just want to help define the features the radio needs.
I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to the question of having a
scope or not. I do not want one. Most of my work is in contests, where the
scope typically shows a huge bar from one end of the band to the other.
This refers to my contest radio.
I also like to play a bit in non-contest operations. For that radio a band
scope would be welcomed. The radio will be controlled by N4PY software. It
doesn't have to have as high of specs as my contest radio. A Jupiter is
just fine. So we can talk about the successor to the Jupiter and define
requirements for it.
73
Rick
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