[CQ-Contest] Contesting Technology - Phone Skimmer Nears Beta Test

[Randy Thompson K5ZD]

It would seem the use of computer sound cards as voice keyers is the root
cause of most SSB modulation and clarity issues.  It took me several sound
cards before I found a combination that sounded good.  

We have several choices as a community.  We can simply not work guys with
bad audio.  Or we can work them and then tell them their audio is bad.
Perhaps if enough people said something, they would work on it.

Randy, K5ZD


> -----Original Message-----
> From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of
> Jim Brown
> Sent: Friday, April 03, 2015 7:35 PM
> To: cq-contest at contesting.com
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Contesting Technology - Phone Skimmer Nears
> Beta Test
> 
> On Fri,4/3/2015 11:25 AM, Marijan Miletic wrote:
> > Five years ago there was a hope that mature speech recognition
> > technology would be applied to limited vocabulary hamradio contesting.
> > It has become April fools joke instead sadly illustrating dumbing of
> our hobby.
> 
> Having just endured another weekend of truly awful audio with WPX SSB, I
> couldn't even get my ear/brain to decode many of them. I heard at least
> 50 stations with audio so badly distorted, muffled, or wildly
> overprocessed that I could not copy them, and at least a hundred more
> where the poor audio quality made me take twice as long to complete the
> QSO.
> 
> I'm not suggesting that we don't use processing/eq/compression -- these
> are excellent techniques if done WELL, but they destroy speech
> intelligibility if done badly. I run my K3 with the three lowest
> frequency bands set for maximum cut and some cut of the fourth (400 Hz)
> band. The remaining bands are set flat. I have compression set for 10 dB
> on peaks, and I carefully set computer playback level so that the radio
> is not overdriven.
> 
> PLEASE -- the next time you are setting up for a SSB contest, either
> listen to your own audio on another rig or get another ham to listen
> critically to your audio.
> 
> 73, Jim K9YC
> 
> 
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