> ... Unfortunately it may
> be the case that it is never completely "right". \
It's one of those things I was referring to in an earlier post. Some will
love it, some won't care, some will hate it. The first and last groups will
forever argue about why it's great or why it's not, and why T-T needs to
change it, or not. The middle group will get a sore neck trying to follow
the arguments of the other two :-)
> marketing hype. Think about how NR actually works. It
> automatically builds a narrow DSP filter around the signal of
> interest. Guess what, you can do exactly the same by
> directly turning Orion's BW knob to 100 Hz!
Absolutely true -- if you're only interested in how it performs on CW at
narrow bandwidths. You don't really need it in that case, and it probably
does more harm than good. Problem is, not all ops are CW contest ops, with
those specific requirements.
On SSB, for example, it builds filters around voice spectral components.
That you can't emulate by just narrowing the bandwidth (ok, maybe to a
point). I always thought the NR in 1.xxx on SSB left the signal muffled
because it seemed to really chop the high end of the spectrum. On the II,
it seems MUCH better in that regard. It works very well on stronger signals
cleaning up the background noise nicely (but adds some small amount of
distortion I can live with). On signals closer to the noise level (not all
that close, I'm not talking about "weak" signal, but "less strong") the
distortion increases, regardless of NR setting, gain adjustments, AGC
adjustments, etc. Weaker signals seem to break up at high NR settings on a
noisy band, and are just distorted and generally unintelligible at low
settings. I haven't tried to quantify these notions of strong, less strong
or weak, but the better the S/N ratio is to start, the better the result --
which is to be expected.
All of that said, I consider NR to be a nicety, not a necessity. I've found
that if I can't copy the signal without NR, I can't copy it with NR --
whether it's Orion's internal process or some fancy external audio box. I
might feel better with NR, but won't necessarily hear any better.
Grant/NQ5T
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