by Kevin Strom, WB4AIO
AT THE BEGINNING of my involvement in amateur radio (I was first licensed in 1972), I was an advocate of AM over SSB. I didn’t even operate SSB regularly until the late 1980s. My main reason for this was the vastly inferior audio quality then prevalent on SSB. (There were rare exceptions, like old Central Electronics phasing exciters used by operators who paid exceptional care to frequency accuracy.) Of course, unmodified commercial AM gear was only a tiny bit better, but that’s a story for another time. There were several problems with SSB in those days: 1) frequency instability; 2) the lack of frequency accuracy (leading to “tuning by ear” by people with tin ears); 3) poor frequency response due to excessively narrow filters; 4) SSB filter ripple; and 5) distortion. Add all these things together, and amateur SSB audio usually sounded very mechanical, robotic, and horribly unnatural. Give me home-built, or broadcast, or modified high-fidelity AM any day!
I still love AM, but today there is great improvement in SSB: the PLL and TCXO and OCXO have made frequency accuracy and stability within ten Hertz or less routine, which by itself makes a huge improvement in how SSB sounds. Add to that the fact that AM and eSSB experimenters have encouraged manufacturers to widen frequency response and lower distortion figures, and the SSB of 2015 has the potential to sound very good indeed — especially if you use a software defined radio.
Lower distortion and wider frequency response actually lead to better communication, because the subtleties and nuances of personality and meaning come through better than they ever could with the old, low-fidelity, so-called “communications quality” audio of the past.
Listen: Liberty Net 9/26″]
Here’s my brief digest of, and comment on, just a few of the issues discussed on this week’s Liberty Net:
• More than 100 Jewish rabbis recently signed an open letter to Prime Minister Cameron calling on Britain to open its borders for even more non-White invaders, bizarrely invoking the largely-fictional “Holocaust” of Jews in WW2 as justification. (43 minutes)
• And, in the US, two different Jewish groups, including the “Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,” said that America was “obligated” to take in a much larger number of non-White invaders than at present. (46 minutes)
• Just on the heels of Russia taking an active role in the Syrian war comes the news that a Chinese aircraft carrier just entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal. Sure looks like the CIA and Mossad (and the false flag “radical Muslim” groups they have created and secretly control) will no longer have a free hand in the Middle East. (49 minutes)
• Apple Inc. is being investigated in Russia for distributing homosexual propaganda due to certain cartoon-like “emojis” with pro-homosexual themes that are included with its iOS operating system. (51 minutes)
• On the controlled media’s sick “South Park” animated television program recently, a homosexual character was shown raping Donald Trump to death. Only in America, folks. Trump is no savior, and is heavily interlocked with the Zionist billionaires who are killing the West, but they hate him anyway, presumably because he has a less than totally subservient attitude. (1 hour 19 minutes)
Thanks to Marty, N2IRJ, you’re able to listen to the Liberty Net right now on your computer here at https://3950.net/ — or download the file and listen anytime on your mp3 player. Check in over the air this week!
Join in or listen to the most exciting net on the amateur bands every Saturday night starting at 10PM Eastern Time.
Our thanks go to W1WCR for his hard work and courage in keeping this very important part of the amateur radio service alive for over 40 years!
Listen: Liberty Net 9/26″]