> When YHY answered me one of the first things he told me was that my > audio was low. I looked at the mod current and indeed it was barely > deflecting on voice peaks. I upped the audio so the mod current was > where it should be and he said it sounded fine. We were talking for > about 45 minutes, and I had the audio upped within the first 5 minutes > of the QSO. When did you make you measurement Brett?
> If you looked at your scope at another time, I'm not sure what to say. > The 5100B was running as it normally does, and I'd think I'd have > received other comments about low audio since I use the 5100B a lot. > I wish you had broke into the QSO and told me; could've played with > the audio a bit. I don't know when I heard it, I think I listened for a while. I don't know if you got it corrected or not. Is that how you set the modulation level, by the modulator plate current? >>and N8YHY was very distorted >> and restricted sounding. Not sure what he was running, but it sounded bad... > Chris was running a Valiant and I assume stock audio. I detected no > distortion and had no trouble copying him whatsoever. I was running > my SX-101A which has a max selectivity of 5 Khz. If your RX has a > higher selectivity setting and Chris is running stock audio, perhaps > that's why he sounded "restricted" ? My receiver has a 5.5 Kc filter in it, I cant hear any highs anyway, so wider does me no good. I thought his audio sounded quite bad, I could understand what he was saying, but it sounded worse then stock audio to me. I use the homebrew receiver detector output into an old Marantz audio amp, into a big hi-fi speaker. I always thought my hearing was so bad, if I thought it sounded bad, it had to be REAL bad.... Your audio sounded ok to me Mark, much better than Chris. >> Why did you guys pick 7292? >> I could not squeeze in above or below you, from 7280 to 7300 was taken up >> with 2 qso's... > I was on 7290, but I do remember adjusting to Chris's frequency a > little; that may be why we ended up on 7292. > Again, just break in and ask us to move down a few Kc's..... It was not that important, just wondered if it was planned or wound up that way. Lots of guys like more than 5kc spacing, but with my lack of high hearing, 5kc is fine, and often people run 7295, 7290, 7285 at the same time. There are a lot of guys on 40 running very basic setups, and I guess that explains it, I am lucky to have got some equipment in the past when it was cheap, and monitor the transmitted signal, it would seem very odd after doing it so long to not know what is going out on the air. I had a qso with Bob, W2ZM, today, and told him he was over modulated in the neg direction quite badly, and had an odd clicking on his signal. He dug out the scope and found he had some sort of transformer short, driver or mod transformer, sometimes it would sound ok, then it would have no positive mod and 150% negative. He had a long qso with someone before me who did not say anything about it to him... I am not some kind of 40 meter Nazi, but I like when people tell me something has gone wacko. I used to run neg cycle loading on the big rig, and lean into it, and people eventually told me (it took a long time) I was REAL wide. I checked on the spec an and I was REAL wide when the neg cycle loading activated, so I removed it. Glad someone told me about it. I worked KC2IFR (Bill), W3CRR (Craig), KA3ZLR (Jack) today, 40 was much better than yesterday. Bill has a very good sounding kenwood T599, one of those OLD kenwood twins, but I suppose some old SSB stuff was easier to get sounding good on AM then the new rigs, maybe fewer filters in the TX chain. His sounded very good and clean. Brett N2DTS
