Rick,
I don't want to confine anybody to anything.
Complaints abound about the display, about the
bandscope, about the QSK, about this and about that.
A good deal of this could easily be handled exactly
how I describe. Because 95% of the hams don't like my
idea is irrelevant to me. The question was regarding
future improvement in the Orion. I want a real
improvement not just the same old rig slightly better
or slightly cheaper, or slightly more expensive with
the addition of a color display. I don't want an
Orion Pro or an Orion Junior. I already have an
Orion. Even the new Icom super rig which I also saw
on Saturday, to me is basically an Icom Pro X^2 or
something like that. As we used to say down on 3895
in the old days, that thing don't have no motor, but
it sure has some pretty meters. Why it sits there and
virtually bats its eyes at you.
You will note the thread covered leaving out the band
scope, leaving out the second RX, all resulting in a
cheaper but "still really good" Orion. My concept
leaves out even more, resulting in a far cheaper but
still bullet proof "Orion", and allows you to add back
just as much functionality as you like. You want a 19
inch full color display, buy it. You want 2 of them,
buy it. You want a pair of 48 bit DSP sound cards?
One for the right ear and one for the left ear? Buy
them. You want 100wpm QSK buy a pentiumVI with multi
thread processor and you could have that since the
things that slow down the rigs QSK, like generating
the side tone could be handled by the computer's
processor, freeing up the Orion's processor for
mundane tasks like actually switching the radio
quickly and correctly. You want fancy outputs on
multiple channels well guess what there are bunches of
outputs available on sound cards these days.
The rig can therefore cost as much as you care to
spend. If all you want is bullet proof rag chewing
rig to bark at the boys down on South Cars, buy a $400
to $500 dollar used laptop off ebay, add it to the
Orion front end and an Extigy external sound card for
50 bucks and have at it. If you want a bullet proof
IF for your moonbounce station this would probably fit
your bill as well.
If you keep every thing in one stand alone box you
confine yourself to a 3 or 4 kilobuck price tag, and
stuff you don't really want, in a rig that doesn't
have enough processing, in a world where significant
hardware updates occur every 18 months. Maybe it
doesn't make any sense to you, but it makes perfect
sense to me.
As far as the flex radio goes. I saw it at the
Orlando Hamfest on Saturday, and to my way of thinking
it is still more of a promise than a reality. If the
promise comes to fruition, and Ten Tec hasn't improved
to the same degree, I will be buying one I assure you.
73 W9OY
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