I've been using a Heil headset for many years with my FT 1000D, and now
also the K3. I have never felt there is inadequate volume from either
rig through the headphones. Using narrow filters on CW, the volume
settings are about 60 per cent of full volume. And often I have to back
off from that. Bob N7UA
Bill W4ZV wrote:
K7TV wrote:
What is adequate headphone sensitivity may be highly dependent on
operating mode and rig selectivity.
Case in point: Many years ago I ordered an FT-1000 and a Heil headset
(forget which model). Headset volume was fine for voice, and for CW using
a wide filter. But the FT-1000, like the K3, can be set to very narrow CW
filtering. This brings down the noise to far below what you have at more
"normal" bandwidth. On a quiet band one can then work CW stations that are
extremely weak. In my case, that is where the Heil headset became
unuseable, because of inadequate volume. In my opinion, when trying to
copy the weakest possible CW signal for a given bandwidth, the gain needs
to be high enough that the noise level is quite loud. I sent the Heil
headset back to the store. This episode begs the question: The K3 being
famous for its "quiet" receiver, does it have enough rx audio gain to
provide a loud background noise level in CW mode using the 50 Hz
bandwidth, for an average speaker or for a reasonable headset (not Heil!)?
I don't agree that's the best way to copy weak signals...but that's another
issue in itself.
http://www.eham.net/articles/9982 (A few days I broke that record at 26
uW).
The sticker on my BM-10 states "IMP 32 OHM", which is what I measure for
each side. Using it:
50 Hz BW, max RF Gain, AGC-Fast and CONFIG: AF GAIN HI (default setting).
AF GAIN is set to 12 o'clock for a comfortable level listening to a dummy
load (i.e. strictly RX background noise). With any sort of band noise I
would need even less AF GAIN. The 1 uV output (-107 dBm) from an XG1 is
uncomfortably high and I backed off AF GAIN to ~10 o'clock for that. Both
of my Heil ProSet headsets measure >200 ohms per side and they also have
plenty of output with the K3. BTW I normally have CONFIG: AF GAIN set to LO
for all my headphones.
I can't explain others' problems but all 3 of my Heil headsets have plenty
of AF gain with the K3...even for very weak signals buried in noise.
73, Bill
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