Yes, this release was worth the wait. The levels of cw keying sidetone
and spot tone are back in balance, and I find that a couple of obscure
bugs like "loss of audio on keydown when aux rx in AM mode" are fixed
so I can have the aux rx set to monitor WWV. The cw sidetone sounds
ok here, however.
As advertised, the QSK is improved, I really appreciate that, and the
band stacking register indicator is immediately useful.
I wonder if the AGC attack time has been tweaked, as band noise seems
less harsh - but maybe is it my imagination?
Bob NW8L
On 4/24/07, Merle Bone <merlebone@charter.net> wrote:
I agree that this V2 release for the Orion - V2.060b - has a lot of new changes
to like.
The "Split" indicator and Band-stacking Register IDs are a good ergonomic
improvement.
I ran some SSB tests of the "Signal Processing" with a friend tonight and got very good reports on the audio
quality all the way up to a 9 setting. He said there was a "little echo" sound at 9 but clear and good
quality audio (He knows me well and knows how my voice sounds). The local power meter and his remote S-Meter both
indicated about a 3-4db increase in power from no processing to processing at level 8 - but no "processed
audio" sound. The V1.373b5 gets about 6-7dB of power improvement with no "compressed audio" sound. So
there is still some room for improvement in this area for SSB DX work - but good performance in this release.
There is some "audio artifact" on the CW keying sidetone.
The "Monitor" audio seems improved. Checking it against my friend on the other
end of an SSB circuit it seemed to what he was hearing on the other end. Previously it
had some distortion which was not apparent on the other end of the SSB circuit.
The AM receive is excellent! Opening up the bandwidth made a huge improvement!
The "Noise Reduction" does seem to be nicely improved when using it with SSB - which is
likely to be the best use of this feature. There seems to be very little "attenuation" of
the signal through level 8.
The QSK speed seems to have been improved in this release. I can copy a carrier
between code elements to about 27WPM and between characters up to 40WPM or
greater. Nice improvement.
All in all this seems like a real improved V2 release for the Orion. I plan to run it for a while -
first time I haven't gone directly back to V1.373b5 since the early V2 beta testing. With a little
more average power improvement on Speech Processing and finding a way to keep signals taken out by
the notch filters from "pumping the AGC." and this could be the best release
"ever" for the Orion - from my usage perspective.
Thanks TEN-TEC!
73, Merle - W0EWM
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