What was I thinking? (!)
No, I do not want government regulating our transmitter technology.
I've had worse ideas, but this one was right up there!
I guess I was just thinking out loud and got carried away in the wrong
direction. Sorry.
The fact is, the current TX rules were written in another age, when we were
all using a different technology.
They are no longer sufficient.
The ARRL and Rob Sherwood are testing this stuff, but most of us (including
me, until recently), just look to see that it meets the legal specs, and
tick the box.
I think we (the ham community) should determine what we need and perhaps the
ARRL, DARC, etc. should drive suggestions to local legislators to get a new
definition that would help clean up the bands. It would be better if the
manufactures would just do it without legislation. I bet they would if they
thought it would sell more radios.
Hey, we got them to give us better receivers. So why can't we get them to
give us better transmitters?
Well we can.
Two tone testing (alone) is inadequate.
Rob Sherwood has been doing some white noise testing of the transmitters.
Transmitters previously thought to be good, suddenly are no longer looking
so good.
Jim has mentioned pink noise.
Whatever it takes, but we need to improve our methodology for testing our
transmitters.
The ARRL has a committee for determining what and how they should test
transceivers.
These are the guys who can help drive the change.
The fact is, there are SIGNIFICANT differences in the noise and in the width
of the signals of transmitters currently on the market.
When using a bad transmitter together with a 1.5KW amp, even though using
good adjustments, it has the same effect as when some LID turns up his
mic gain and compression gain on a good radio to an excessive level and
drives an amp.
It is within our power to improve the knowledge level of our fellow hams,
but even a good op will have a bad signal with some of the radios on the
market today.
How many hams know this? I didn't know it until I began looking in detail
to Rob Sherwood's recent work. (don't just look at the receivers)
IMHO, far too few hams know this.
Most still think it's the bad hams causing the bad signals on our bands.
It's BOTH.
When we have a technical discussion about this TX problem, we need to STAY
FOCUSED and give specific facts. They are available. The manufacturers
follow these discussions too.
If everyone jumps into the discussion and starts blaming the LID operator,
*this dilutes the message to the vendors*. They can simply point their
fingers at the LID.
All of us agree that poor operators are causing problems.
Some of us still need to acknowledge that at least a part of the problem is
coming from poorly designed transmitters that are being sold to everyone,
whether a good or a bad operator. Once we have done that, then we can get
focused on the problem, just as we focused on Receiver Problems over the
past two decades.
THEN we can finally hope to see some improvements on our bands.
As a side effect, maybe some of the poor operators will start to think about
the problem too and learn how to clean up their act.
73
Rick, DJ0IP
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