[ICOM] PRO/PRO2 vs. 775DSP

[Earl W Cunningham]

Hi, Hans,

You wrote:

"It is very striking to see that there are big differences in yours and
the one from Sherwood Engineering:
http://www.sherweng.com/table.html  E.g. the TenTec Orion in their
comparison is the number One, while in your comparison the Orion is the
number Last."
==========
My comparison was from the "real world" aspect, while Sherwood's was from
laboratory testing.

I had high hopes for the Orion when I bought it, but from the start it
had problems:

1) My main complaint when it was new was the high-pitched whine in the
headset on CW.  Ten Tec said they had a mod to cure the whine and asked
me to send it to them to fix it.  When it was returned to me, the whine
was still there, but attenuated from before.  In fact, all of the audio
was attenuated!!  Ten Tec told me that they put a resistor in series with
the headphone audio as a temporary fix until they had a better mod for
the whine!!  This gave me a hint of the shoddiness of Ten Tec's
engineering.

2) The ergonomics of the radio left much to be desired.  For example,
when going to Split operation, VFO B would go to the settings it was on
the last time it was used.  Split on CW might result in SSB with wide
filter on VFO B, etc.  A call to the engineers at Ten Tec about this, and
they said, "the beta testers decided that this would be the best way to
do it."  Obviously there were no DXers among the beta testers!

3) When I A/B tested the radio, I was appalled by how poorly it performed
on weak CW signals.  Ten Tec advised me on how to set the AGC for this
purpose, but nothing I tried would help.  They asked me to send the radio
to them again so that they could look into the problem.  They ran the
radio on their test bench for a week and called me to say they could find
nothing wrong with it.  That's when I requested a refund, so they kept
the radio and sent me the money (which I used to buy a new Pro2).

I understand that W8JI now has that same radio and he also is not too
pleased with it.

Perhaps the new Orion II has fixed those problems -- we'll see.

73, de Earl, K6SE