Development on the Orion I started in 1999. This was happening along side the Pegasus and Jupiter development. The DSP for the Orion is Analog Devices 21k series floating point, compared to fixed point for other Ten-Tec DSP radios. Floating point improved overall signal processing quality while also simplifying some of the AGC routines.
In addition, the Orion included a second DSP processor for simultaneous processing of two receive signals, giving the radio dual receive capability.
A major architectural difference between the Orion radios and the Pegasus/Jupiter radios is the inclusion of a processor dedicated to the user interface. For the Pegasus/Jupiter radios, the DSP processor performed both signal processing and user interface operations. Where as the Orion had a Dragonball Processor dedicated to the user interface.
The Motorola Dragonball processor was selected because, at the time, Palm Pilot PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistants) were all the rage and that was the processor being used in them. The Dragonball processor had built in support for LCD screens and a large memory space. The LCD display was monochrome for the Orion I while the Orion II sported a color LCD display.
