Ten Tec 506 and Arduino

Sun May 19 14:30:20 CDT 2013

OK Mike, gotcha!  Thanks for the clarification.  I thought that you were talking about the price of the Ten-Tec 506 (Rebel), which I found to be the $199 , after a  bunch of Googling.

The Palstar is a much more extensive rig (SSB & CW, 5-band, etc), with a much higher price to match.  It will be interesting to see how the Palstar matches up with other, stand-alone SDR-based radios, and what technology is inside.  If it’s just another Softrock-like QSD/QSE, then yawn, OK.  If it’s DDC/DUC-based, that could be interesting.  It actually appears to be neither, saying a 11-pole xtal filter, implying a “traditional” IF-based superhet radio?  The TFT screen is sexy.  And, DDS-based is no big whoop.

I can’t see the Palstar TR-30 competing even with the Elecraft KX3, but the info on it is just too early to tell for sure.  I LOVE my KX3.  The FT817 hasn’t seen any action since the KX3 arrived.
73, Terry, WB4JFI

From: Mike O'Dell 
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 2:54 PM
To: wb4jfi at knology.net 
Cc: 'Tacos' ; Gerald Wolczanski 
Subject: Re: Ten Tec 506 and Arduino

The anticipated price was right there on the web page:

I hope to review one once it is in production. Palstar expects the TR-30 to be available August 2013.

(Click to enlarge)

When I asked about the price, the told me a range of $1,500-2,000 US. (Gulp!

"Gulp" would seem to be an appropriate response.

    -mo

On 5/18/13 2:42 PM, wb4jfi at knology.net wrote:

  Mike, where did you see the price?  I looked on the Ten-Tec web site last night, and could not find it.  After a Google search, I found one mention of $199.  That's not too far out of line for a production radio from a real company, although this rig is quite limited out of the box.  Compared to a Softrock, the Rebel could be of interest to beginners, for example.  I'm kind of surprised that Ten-Tec was the company to come up with this.  They have been dinged in the past for not providing software/code and other info for some of their other radios. 

  The 506 uses a chipKIT version of the Uno, which is made by Digilent, the same vendor that makes the Nexys2 FPGA boards some of us have played with. The chipKITt boards are not 100% Arduino compatible, but are very nice. They have more resources than their Arduino counterparts, and run faster (80MHz vs 16MHz).  There is more memory, more I/O, etc.  They use 32-bit Microchip PIC processors rather than Atmel processors.  The pricing is very similar to Arduinos. 

  There are two chipKIT boards, the Uno32 (like an Arduino Uno)($27), and the Max32($50), like an Arduino Mega2560. 

  They claim to be mostly compatible with Arduinos.  This is based on both the hardware I/O almost matching the Arduino footprint (allowing many but not all shields to work) and mostly software compatible AT THE IDE LEVEL.  A lot of work has gone into bending the Arduino IDE to create PIC-able code instead of Atmel (or a mid-level interpreter?).  You can also program them using the Microchip PIC32 development environments if you prefer that. 

  These chipKIT boards might be of interest to those AMRADers that are finding the Uno too tight to complete projects with (hint hint).  There are some incompatabilites with the Arduino line, both in hardware and software. 
  73, Terry, WB4JFI 

  -----Original Message----- From: Mike O'Dell 
  Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2013 11:27 AM 
  To: 'Tacos' 
  Cc: wb4jfi at knology.net ; Gerald Wolczanski 
  Subject: Re: Ten Tec 506 and Arduino 

  The design is very clean and nice, 
  but the price has too many digits in it 
  unless there's some compelling info 
  not apparent in that admittedly cursory 
  blurb. 

      -mo 

  On 5/17/13 7:05 PM, wb4jfi at knology.net wrote: 

    Thanks Gerald.  This looks rather interesting, depending on price. 
    Terry, WB4JFI 

    -----Original Message----- From: Gerald Wolczanski Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 4:44 PM To: 'Tacos' Subject: Ten Tec 506 and Arduino 
    http://qrper.com/ 

    _______________________________________________ 
    Tacos mailing list 
    Tacos at amrad.org 
    https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos 
    _______________________________________________ 
    Tacos mailing list 
    Tacos at amrad.org 
    https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20130519/117f75b1/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: photo-2-225x300.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 23199 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20130519/117f75b1/attachment-0001.jpg>