Perhaps the reason you could not get it to work in 45 minutes is that some
one had screwed it up royaly before you got to it, and maybe it needed to go to
an operating capable set up before you got to play with it. for instance
close the BW down to 0 and lock the rig on vfo2 and put it in cw mode with
the hi cut and low cut crossed up, and the power to 0, etc.. this would give
you a signal with 0 band width and no power and be darned hard to fix with out
unlocking the vfo and such. RESET time.
I took my orion out of the box, stuck it in the hole in the operating
station plugged in power, antenna, ground and turned it on. boot up took
about 20
seconds, I pushed the 20 meter button , a spun the dial, keyed up and made my
first QSO. that was easy.
I played with it for a bit, and my friend and ten tec afficinaido came by
and we did a firm ware up grade, ( I knew we had to reset, upgrade and the
reset again so I looked in the manual for how to master reset.. I know that is
cheating but...) turned it back on and am still using it over a month later.
I have actually only done 3 master resets other than those for up grade. I
find most of my problem is that I really don't pay attention to what I
pushed in what order, and oops, but now I have my prefrences iset up in the
user1-
user 2 buttons.
So if I get the band with smaller than the band pass or something silly I
use user 1 to go to my rag chew setup ( 50 watts, nice bassy mic and widre
band with tx and rx, or to user 2 which is narrower bandwidth, 65 watts for
the
linear, higher pitch on tx voice and narrower filtering, and more DSP for
contesting and dx. but it ain't that hard to use.
Folks it is really a pretty easy rig to use. A lot of the controls are quite
similar to my Icom - 756 and ste up quite easy. they both have band with
and band pass tuning, selectable RIT/XIT , main and sub recievers and many
other similar setups. of all my rigs I can compare the Orion to the 756 for
ease of use. I do think the Orion has a much better reciever and a lot of the
functions are produced in a radically different fasjion, but end result is
quite similar.
So go play with one, don't let it scare you, their is nothing short of
hooking up the power backwards you cna do to really hurt this rig. Its a
keeper.
tom N6AJR
In a message dated 6/21/2005 11:54:18 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
k5uj@hotmail.com writes:
BTW, as I've stated before, I tried to operate an Orion on phone at a TT
hamfest for 45 minutes unsucessfully. And I always thought I could get any
rig to at least transmit, without a manual. Omni VI is still my go-to cw
rig. Great front-end.
Moving on now...
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