[Elecraft] What is your experience with the K3's AFX?

[Tom Childers, N5GE]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:12:11 -0700 (PDT), nz0t <NZ0T at cox.net> wrote:

>
>I would like to hear what anybody that wears hearing aids thinks of AFX.  I
>usually take at least one of my aids out since it tends to squeal under a
>headphone and that means having to turn the audio way up.  I'm looking
>forward to trying AFX when my K3 arrives hoping it can help an old deaf guy.
>

One deaf old geezer to another,  I like AFX very much.  I have the Oticon
Synchro devices and these have four selectable settings.  I work CW all the
time, so I asked the audiologist to set the fourth setting to peak each ear at
500hz.  It works great for CW!  When listening to SSB that has a steady carrier
QRM I will get just a little squeal.  When that happens I just remove the
hearing aides and put the head phones back on.  The audiologist gave me the
answer to the cause of the squealing by saying that they cannot fit this type of
hearing aids for piano tuners, because the hearing aids will squeal when hearing
a pure steady sine wave as you would hear on SSB with a carrier in the
background.

It all boils down to one thing (said tongue in cheek).  It's Elecraft's fault
for making such a good RX and the good sine wave audio it produces.

Seriously though,  I was just thinking about our situation a couple of days ago
and decided that I really don't need the hearing devices when using the RX,
since my hearing loss is in the parts of speech that effect the hearing of F's
S's and the other hi pitched parts of sp each, so I tried not using the hearing
aids when using the K3 for a couple of days.  I found that as I suspected, that
due to the way SSB is filtered to reduce bandwidth, the spectrum in which my
hearing loss lies isn't produced by SSB RX's anyway.

Next time I go to the audiologist I'm going to ask her to give me a graph of my
hearing loss and see what adjusting the RX Equalizer to compensate will do for
me.  Maybe you could try the same thing.   

Tom, N5GE - SWOT 3537 - Grid EM12jq

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