[TenTec] Orion NR on SSB

[Dean Showalter]

Hi Grant etal;  Not so obvious I suspect. Thanks very much for putting it
on. I cant wait (yes I can) to try it.

73 de Dean  W5PJR
Tijeras, NM


----- Original Message -----
From: "Grant Youngman" <nq5t at comcast.net>
To: "'Discussion of Ten-Tec Equipment'" <tentec at contesting.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2005 10:41 AM
Subject: [TenTec] Orion NR on SSB


> I may well be the last guy on the block to have this particular epiphany
...
>
> One of the things that the Orion NR does on voice modes is produce an
> extremely bassy output (to my poor ears, anyway).  No highs, and a
> substantial loss of speech articulation.  My solution was always to tilt
the
> RX EQ to a high negative value to restore balance, which sort of helped,
but
> was still unsatisfactory.  The noise may have been reduced but I still
found
> the resulting audio muffled and unpleasant.  I'm sure this effect is the
> result of the way the Orion NR builds filters around the speech
frequencies,
> and the fact that the typical male voice has a great deal of low frequency
> energy.  The nut of it is that I rarely used the Orion NR on SSB.
>
> While checked in to a MARS voice net this morning on a very noisy 7.3 Mhz
> frequency, I got to fiddling with the radio to see what else could be
done.
> An external audio NR had a more balanced audio output spectrum, but I
> generally consider those things unsatisfactory in most cases for other
> reasons.  And I can only listen to their typical "watery" output for so
long
> before throwing in the towel.
>
> I found that by simply using PBT to kill the low audio frequencies in the
> received signal spectrum (set to 200-300Hz) that the result was superb.
> Good articulation, no bassy audio.  Not FI, but if you have to use NR, FI
> becomes a non-issue anyway.  In fact, the whole NR result was much better,
> possibly due to the fact that the energy in the low frequency speech
> spectrum wasn't hitting the AGC.  It was a real pleasure to have really
good
> sounding signals popping up out of the quiet.
>
> I'm just surprised it took me 2 1/2 years to discover this simple and
> obvious tweak :-)
>
> Grant/NQ5T
>
>
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