[Premium-Rx] New radio selection

[Tim Shoppa]

> > Other users have done the same.  But, I query, what have been the 
> > comparable standards of comparison?  If it's other ham gear, then that is 
> > frankly not a big deal.  I have used some of industry's best and I reckon 
> > my ears and fingers know a good set or two.  Once you have used commercial 
> > and military radios made by the likes of Racal, Redifon, Plessey, Skanti, 
> > Marconi, Dansk Radio, Collins, Siemens and Rohde & Schwarz, all made for 
> > the high end of the professional market, the likes of Icom, Kenwood and 
> > Yaesu pale significantly, though in fairness the very latest offerings 
> > from Icom have been a great improvement.

I am overall happy using ham gear on the ham bands. Compared to
the commercial/military rigs, the ham rigs have completely appropriate
AGC systems for a wide variety of signal strengths popping up and
going away in crowded bands. They also have tuning rates and
bandwidths that are right for the ham CW and SSB modes. They suck
pretty bad for AM - AGC hang times and bandwidths on any ham rig
from the SSB era onward are hardly optimal for AM.

The commercial/military rigs shine for "channelized" operation,
sitting on one frequency, one station for extended periods. They
do not work so well tuning around a narrow band filled with
widely varying signal strengths - AGC hang on every commercial
or military rig, whether short or long action is just wrong for this
sort of band scanning. And they also seem to miss the boat with tuning
rates.

There is one trend that both ham and commercial/military rigs
have been following for decades, that is unfortunate for CW reception:
the trend has been very much towards brick wall IF filters, which have
wonderful specs but in the ears they result in horrible ringing, making
it very tiresome to do CW on bands with lots of QRN's for extended periods.
IMHO both ham and commercial/military rigs are misusing DSP techniques
to go even more in the direction of brick wall filtering with wonderful
specs but horrible listenability. My solution to this trend is my
own homebrew receiver with a homebrewed crystal filter designed for
linear phase response.

Tim N3QE