Observations: Heil vs. electret...
If you work through the Heil site and a couple of his videos on HamNation, etc. some things become compelling... - Electrets are VERY sensitive and will pick up a lot of background noise, front, back, left, right, etc. (fannoise, kids, cats, dogs, lawn equipment...) - Heils are designed with acoustic shaping for front pickup of a local voice source and cancelling back and side background - Electrets have little or no native spectral response shaping, generally poor on the lo-end, extended high end (useless) spectral range so you'll be into the equalizer settings a lot to get things sounding right, if at all. OK for shotgun and 'bug' mics, not great for radio. - Heil's ham line are almost perfect un-equalized for ham voice use and much more tolerant avoiding pop, hiss, RF, etc. - Heil's pro line can be amazingly and easily well tailored for ham use from AM through DX - Electrets require DC bias - opportunities for RF, hum intrusion, another complication - Heil - no bias I have the Heil HM-Pro, GM-5 and HM-10 and Yaesu and Kenwood cables - the Yaesu cable is a direct plug-in for the Flex. Out of the box default Flex settings work good, properly setup for gain, EQ, ALC, DX, etc. even better. Recently acquired a PR35, made an adapter cable to the Yaesu cable, external PTT 'dongle' - ran through the recommended audio level setups - WONDERFUL. Given the option - a LOT of reasons to use a Heil in your hand vs. all the hassle and potential issues using $5 worth of "kiddie tape recorder" Mr Microphone element. (don't get a dime for this endorsement, just know what has worked very well under many rigs/conditions.) Message: 1 Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 13:22:55 -0500 From: <wa1...@gmail.com> To: <flexradio@flex-radio.biz> Subject: Re: [Flexradio] Mic recommendations Message-ID: <D9742F58408B473E870654DA406AF1BC@Vostro220> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Jim, I bought my Flex 3000 used and it came with a Heil HM-5 mic. It was just OK... I had an old fashioned Astatic D-104 with the $20 W2ENY replacement electret element that I used with my IC-756ProIII. This works great with my Flex 3000. It has a flat response unlike the speech peaked Heil HM-5. If you want to tailor the W2ENY element, use the 10 band graphic equalizer in the Flex 3000. I would not waste your money on an expensive outboard speech processing unit. http://w2eny.com/D104Replacement/ http://w2eny.com/D104Replacement/instructions.pdf Roger WA1NVC Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 12:53:51 -0500 From: James Eastham <j...@centrelearn.com> To: flexradio@flex-radio.biz Subject: [Flexradio] Mic recommendations Message-ID: <c6238001d1e0dda3324453191fbe6...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 I'm currently using a Heil HM-5 Mic with my Flex 3K. I'm thinking about upgrading and looking for recommendations on what has worked well for other 3K owners. I had a QSO the other day with someone who recommended to just use a basic computer MIC as in $9.95 Electret. What I really want is to have great sounding audio and would consider a preamp box I've heard people use ...or would a high quality mic make that unnecessary? Thanks Jim NX3Z _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flexradio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flexradio.com/
