Seeing this Orion 7000 being sold for £326 on E bay recently brought back memories of the origin of this transceiver. In the mid 80’s we became aware that there was a market for a channelized HF transceiver with 100W output that could be used by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in developing countries which lacked communications infrastructure. Customers would include aid agencies and medical help organisations. This resulted in the Orion 5000 which we sold very well all over the world. One factor was the channel restrictions foreign governments put on NGOs as to what frequencies they could transmit on and at that time synthesized transceivers where not allowed. Competition for this market was great with most of it coming from either the US (SGC) or Austalia (Codan). However typically we sat on our laurels and failed to see that these guys where developing synthesized products which could be set up on specific frequency channels. By the 90’s we were losing market share so quickly set in train the development of the Orion7000 which was a synthesized channelized 100W HF transceiver. Development took longer than we expected and by the time it was launched we had lost our major customer (ie the Red Cross). Soon afterwards the company closed down and the communications products were eventually sold to Ring Communications who probably sold off some of the Orion7000’s to the retail market. I used one once at a BVWS/NVCF do at the Warwick exhibition centre where I had managed to re-programme it to operate on the amateur bands. Using an SGC300 tuner and a long wire I had a few QSO’s at the show where Alan Ainslie was exhibiting some of his vast collection of Eddystone receivers.