ussv dharma wrote: > IF you have 179 or more days of Honorable Service, retired or not, > you are entitled to two hearing aids (at VA expense) if your hearing > loss impacts on your daily living.
The VA has given me aids for years, and they replace them with new technology ones periodically. For the last 7 years I've had about $6,500 worth of fantastic DSP microelectronics stuffed in my ears thanks to the US Taxpayer. They are supposed to have a life of 3-4 years these are going strong. I certainly hope I deserve this gift, they really have changed my life. We're going down to see the Pirates of Penzance tonight and I WILL be able to hear the orchestra and actors :-) That said, for anyone with hearing problems and a K3, while my aids don't work under my Heil headphones [they feed back ... I can't hear it but it distorts the audio I can hear], you will be very surprised at what you can do with the K3 RX equalizer alone, it just takes some experimentation. While it has +-16dB range for each band, I was able to approximate 32dB range by lowering the lower frequencies and raising the higher frequencies, and then turning up the little external audio amp to bring the lower frequencies back up. My wife tells me the higher frequencies are distorted and deafeningly loud for her in the headphones, but I can't hear that anyway and as a result I can copy SSB with comfort in mild noise and QRM, although contests are a real struggle. I got my amplifier at Radio Shack, it plugs directly into the headphone jack on the back of my K3, has three outputs, and runs on a couple AA cells forever, it seems. This scheme does not fully restore my hearing of course, below 1KHz or so it's about 90 dB down, and gone above 1.3-1.4 KHz, but it's brought rag chew SSB back into my hobby. I don't know if the +-16dB per band limit on the RX EQ is an arbitrary value or constrained by something else in the DSP, but an option to have more than that, if possible, could get Elecraft some strong ADA points :-) 73, Fred K6DGW - Northern California Contest Club - CU in the 2010 Cal QSO Party 2-3 Oct 2010 - www.cqp.org ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
