Mark Conrad wrote:

Good Grief, do they still sell the Ten-Tec, I used to own one
in the old days, a nice little full break-in rig.

Ten-Tec is alive and well, still selling ham rigs. Their current top of the line
the Orion II is as good as or better than the K3, depending upon whom you ask.
I've never used either, so I am not one to ask. :-)

Their older rigs still work, Ten-Tec still fixes them when they can, and
just recently stopped selling the manuals and now has them online for free
download.

There may be some changes coming, the head of the ham radio division just
left. He bought Vibroplex, is moving the company to where he lives and will
run it. There were some joint Ten-Tec Vibroplex projects in the past if I
remember correctly, maybe there will be more.



Being able to extract that one weak signal in a pile-up is a
different matter, but many people don't care to. I would
not want to spend an entire afternoon listening to a
250Hz filter, no matter what it was made of (crystal,
mechaincal, digital, etc). Someone else might.

What! - watch it, that would be heaven for me ;-)


How long has it been since you've been on the air? It may not be as wonderful
as your memories. If it is, good there are plenty of rigs with filters like
that out there for you to buy. There are also DSP audio filters to add on
as you please.



Of course I would demand a few modern touches, such as
automatically generating morse code by first speaking
into a microphone and converting my voice to text,
(very easy to do, BTW, using modern
speech recognition software, like "MacSpeech"
for the Mac, or "Dragon NaturallySpeaking"
on a Windows computer)
- then feeding that text into a device that would change
the text into morse code and store it temporarily in
a computer buffer - - - to be dumped into the xmtr
at a touch of a button for morse-code transmission
to the distant station.


Sure but why? Why not just use SSB.



I fantasize about finding a device that will change
morse code into text, because modern computers
can easily change text to an artificial voice,
which nowadays sounds exactly like a real person.

My AEA Morse Machine 3 did that, I expect there are programs around to do that.
Come to think of it so did my PK-232. My guess is that there are a lot of
people out there using such devices (keyboards to morse and morse to ascii)
than you would think. It's easy to tell the spacing and timing is too perfect.

As regards listening to the high-pitched hiss of a
narrow CW filter, seems to me in the old days that I
kinda got around that by first using a somewhat wider
filter, like 500Hz, then shutting off my receivers
BFO entirely. (is shutting off the BFO still possible
on modern CW rigs?)

What is a BFO? Seriously, the high end rigs don't use them. They detect CW
using the product detector (SSB) or some similar method.

If that's what you want there are still a lot of older rigs out there,
lovingly maintained and updated.

There are yahoo lists for Yaseu (fox-tango) and other lists for ten-tec and
drake. You should be able to find someone with the exact rig you want if that's
what turns you on.

BTW, there is no law that limits the amount of radios you own, and since
you are in the US, you don't have to register them when you buy them and
notify the authorities that you sold them. You don't even need a license to
buy them so you can scrounge around, buy an older rig (or a new one if you
want) and start out by listening.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.