It seems the emergency responders in the US Fire Services looked at
background noise and P25 radio codec performance for their safety critical
workers soon after its introduction.

http://www.iafc.org/associations/4685/files/digProj_DPWGinterimReport.pdf
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/publications/08-453.aspx

http://utahvhfs.org/dstar_codec_behavior.html

FWIW, the Utah site mentions how companding may confound encoding of low
level audio in the presence of background noise.

Regards,

Erich.



> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 09:33:15 +0930
> From: David Rowe <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Freetel-codec2] microphones
> To: [email protected]
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
> Thanks Jean-Marc,
>
> Just had a chat with some local Hams on our morning "drive time" net and
> I have a radio receiver model:
>
> + a microphone is an antenna with a noise figure.  We assume linearity
> for now (the microphone isn't clipping and is linear).
>
> + To remove some variables lets say we take extacly the same mic and try
> it 2cm and 50cm away from the speakers lips.
>
> + If you take the same microphone and move it away the signal power
> drops and (given the same noise figure) SNR must decrease. Adding extra
> gain doesn't help the SNR, just like adding gain down the track in a
> radio receiver doesn't help the SNR.
>
> + Over a longer path, different frequency components will be attenuated
> by different amounts, as the lips are not equally efficient in radiating
> at all frequencies.  Here we diverge from the radio analogy; radio
> signals are usually narrow compared to the antenna bandwidth.
>
> + A microphone further away picks up multi-path reflections from the
> room, laptop case, that start to become significant compared to the
> direct path.  Summing a delayed version of the original signal will have
> an impact on the frequency response and/or add reverb - just like a HF
> or VHF radio signal.  These may be really hard to remove.
>
> -/-
>
> Re the Speex denoiser, yes good idea.  I have that in command line unit
> test form in codec2-dev (so I can pipe audio files through it) and BTW
> we are also using it in the FreeDV GUI program where it's helping with
> background noise - thanks Jean Marc :-)
>
> -/-
>
> Gd point on the energy of the low freq speech components - I am looking
> into a related problem (see Glen's post) with samples that have much
> greater LF than HF energy.  These tend to do poorly, which I think is
> due to the LPC (short term spectrum) model struggling with the high
> dynamic range. LPC analysis designs a filter to mimimise the energy in
> the residual (the signal after filtering), so will "throw poles" at the
> high energy parts first.
>
> Our ears, however have a log response to energy, so the codec breaks and
> sounds bad (or rather even worse Lol).
>
> Thanks,
>
> David
>
> On 24/07/15 08:16, Jean-Marc Valin wrote:
> > Hi David,
> >
>
>
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