[Elecraft] Operation of silver lollipop

Mon Oct 27 12:37:03 2003

Hi Lenny,

The SSB audio you're hearing that "sounded better than most old AM rigs",
might be "Enhanced SSB" or as it's also known "Upper Wideband" or "Lower
Wideband".

What some hams are doing is tailoring their transmitted SSB audio, enhancing
it primarily by adding lower audio frequencies.  Their goal is to achieve
near broadcast quality audio on amateur SSB.  Needless to say, the FCC does
not look kindly on this.  See:
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2003/04/17/102/.

The FCC has cited several amateurs with violation of §97.307(a) of the
Amateur Service rules that requires the signal of an amateur station to not
occupy "more bandwidth than necessary for the information rate and emission
type being transmitted, in accordance with good amateur practice."  Some
signals have been seen on the bands as wide as 8 kHz!

There have also been several letters to the editor and a couple of op-ed
pieces in recent issues of QST on this subject.  Of course the FCC will have
no say with regard to the Colombian ham's audio.

73,

Bill...
AIØC

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of w2bvh
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2003 10:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Elecraft] Operation of silver lollipop

Hi

I  inherited this silver lollipop recently with the numbers "D-104 / 
T-UG9" on it. It was new-in-box and it seemed a shame to let it languish 
in the cellar. So yesterday I wired it up to an 8-pin mic connector and 
had my xyl judge the audio out of the K-2 in test mode (SSBA BAL) while 
I fooled with the OP1 bfo setting.

Now I haven't worked voice (AM or SSB) since the early '70s so I'm 
pretty rusty on voice operation, but about 2300Z  tonight I was 
listening on 20 meters, and lo and behold the CQ WW was still going on. 
It doesn't take too much operating technique to say "Whiskey 2 Bravo 
Victor Hotel 5905". Over 15 minutes I was able to utter those words 5 
times and work Colombia twice, Aruba twice and Curacao. All with 5 watts 
PEP. The ops didn't seem to have trouble copying it ether. Really 
amazing that 5 watts (peak) smeared over a 2+ khz bandwidth can carry so 
far so easily.

One of the Colombia op's ssb audio sounded better than most old AM rigs. 
I'd love to know what kind of rig makes such beautiful audio.

Anyway, I still intend to stick with efficient modes (CW / psk) most of 
the time, but now that I see that ssb qrp is viable, I guess I'll give 
it a try again some time.

73,
Lenny W2BVH

ps - I think I'll even send in a 5 Q log for the CQ WW.

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