[TowerTalk] static busters

Tod Olson (MN) tao@skypoint.com
Mon, 4 Sep 2000 15:01:02 -0500


> 7) Put the earphones on your neck instead of on your ears.
> Sometimes this does the trick.  Those old time CW ops who
> monitored the 500KHz  distress frequency found this to be an
> effective way to save ears  but still copy.
>

Bob Schoening(SK), who had the calls WØBE and WØTKX used to have the
headphones (unpadded ones) located on his temples just ahead of the ears. He
told me he had learned to do this when he was a ship's radioman. I have
tried it and think that this method uses 'bone conduction" for the
transmission of the sound. I do know that using this method of "listening "
should minimize the damage to the tiny hairs that are the audio receptors
located in the inner ear. I believe that I have read that these hairlike
receptors are damaged over time by high amplitude vibrations. That seems to
be corroborated by comments from friends who have spend many hours listening
for weak cw signals on HF or VHF and now state that they have hearing loss
that in very narrow frequency ranges below 1000 Hz. (Like the rest of us old
folks they also have hearing loss above 15 kHz, but it is not in narrow
ranges).

I suspect that the bone might filter high frequencies from the headphone
audio since there is less energy in those frequency ranges and perhaps not
enough energy to make it into one's head. (Is this where the term "bonehead"
might have come from?).

Just a bit of trivia for those who may be interested.

Tod, KØTO



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