[Elecraft] K3: Voice pitch adjustment on SSB

[O. Johns]

Folks,

I read the web pages about ESSB, after seeing on the reflector that  
the K3 now supports it.  It struck me that even ESSB doesn't solve one  
big issue with voice transmission: PITCH.  Tuning the SSB receiver  
changes the overall pitch of the received voice.  Unless you have met  
the sending ham or at least talked to him/her on the phone (or on  
AM!!), you have no real idea how high- or low-pitched the voice really  
is.  One can only guess, and get a sort of feel for what a reasonable  
tuning is.

One way to solve this may seem a joke, but it isn't.  Everyone should  
buy a little 440 Hz pitch pipe, the kind used to tune musical  
instruments.  Then, say, the net control could blow his pitch pipe at  
the start of the net and all the listeners could blow their little  
pitch pipes while listening to net control.  They would all then  
adjust their receiver tunings until the pitches matched.  Like a  
shortwave orchestra tuning up.  (Of course, this might violate the FCC  
rule against music on ham radio, but maybe not if the pitch pipe was  
near a pure sine wave.  Then the signal transmitted by net control  
would be just an ordinary CW signal, but at 440 Hz from the net  
control's suppressed carrier.)

A refinement would be to build a pure 440 Hz tone generator into the  
microphone preamps of radios.  Net control pushes a button while  
transmitting and it goes out over the air.  The net members push  
another button while receiving to produce a 440 Hz tone in their  
speakers along with the received signal from net control.  Then the  
receiving operators adjust their receiver tuning until the pitches  
coincide.  For the tone challenged among us, the receiver tuning could  
even be automated, much like the K3 already does for sidetone on CW.

This scheme came to me when I was adjusting the audio parameters on my  
K2.  I had the K2 running into a dummy load, and was listening to it  
on headphones plugged into a TenTec RX320D across the room.  Since the  
K2 was on a dummy load, I tried whistling and was surprised and  
pleased to find that the PITCH of my whistle didn't match the one I  
was hearing on the phones.  But I could adjust the RX320D tuning until  
they did match.  Guarantee of zero beat and realistic pitch in voice  
reception.

Doesn't seem that this would be too hard to do.  Maybe the K3 could  
even do it in firmware?


73,

Oliver Johns W6ODJ