[Elecraft] K3: Voice pitch adjustment on SSB

[Guy, K2AV]

One thing I seem to be noting more and more on SSB, that operators are tuning
up on the "zeros" and the rigs are good enough to put that within a few
cycles.  For tuning around on SSB, I've gone to the practice of setting freq
display to nnnn.000, holding COARSE, setting it to 100 hz steps and tuning
through the phone band. Surprising how many (most?) sound clear at some
nnnn.0 that way. 

A few Hz one way or another won't make much difference. Spot on net
frequencies don't require transmitting any tones. Let everyone with the
accuracy transmit and receive "on the zeros". Let the others zero in. 

The reason this was done differently in the "old days" was that people did
not have rigs that would set or stay accurately on a frequency. So everyone
would do their best to zero the NCS.  Both my MP and K3 come up dead on WWV
every time all the time. 

To listen to Yankees on WCBS radio (not always easy from NC), I set dial to
880.000 and listen up or down ESSB using 6Khz roofing filter.  I can do the
same thing to listen to music on Radio Moscow on 7125.000. 

73, Guy


O. Johns wrote:
> 
> 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
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