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
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|