With today's technology, it's not necessary to use this
indirect method.
Let's bury this dinosaur once and for all.
Not so fast.
The point of the S-Meter movement upward, as I recall the endless
discussions of all of this regarding the Orion, is to give you a notion
of
the MINIMUM signal that will impact AGC, via the THRESHOLD setting. If
you
leave the S-meter reading unaffected, what does it tell you ... Not much.
This "artifact of a bygone era" is telling you what signal level is
required
to affect AGC. For example, if you have an s-7 average noise level, one
might, to keep things a bit quieter, increase THRESHOLD until the meter
read
about s-7. At least that was the point as I recall it, and I've always
found
it useful for that purpose. And why not? You are unlikely to hear any
rare
DX below this level, anyway. And it sure keeps the nosie level down,
without any reduction in RF (IF) gain.
The coupling of RF GAIN and THRESHOLD in one control in later Orion
firmware
releases was done to satisfy a lot of people who couldn't get their brain
straight about THRESHOLD (the level at which AGC action would begin, RF
GAIN
(really an IF gain control), and the fact that there were two separate
controls with quite different functions.
So T-T simplified things a bit by providing some THRESHOLD shift as RF
gain
is adjusted. But you can still set threshold as you like, since the
control
is still there. Perhaps, once again, some refresher on why this is set
up
to do what it does would be in order :-)
Grant/NQ5T
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