Exploring Microphones (condenser vs dynamic vs hand mic) 

Glad it was helpful, thank you!

Much appreciated!

Alright!! It will be shipping out here in CA soon!

Thank you Sandy!

I

Glad you enjoyed it! Yes, we will be doing more with mics and phantom power soon. We are in the process of building cables to sell for different type of mics that would plug into different radios.

Much appreciated! Yeah, we are just trying to have fun and show cool stuff and people comment like we are college professors. lol

That was Friture friture.org/ Thanks!

WARNING!!!! Site has TROJAN VIRUS

@@mikepansini4904 Hi Mike, if you happen to be a Windows 10 user, you can use the link to the Microsoft store. If you download there you won't get any alerts. It's a great program and I have used for it for several years now on a Windows machine. 73, Jason

Glad to hear it!

Much appreciated

How did we do? lol

@@HamRadioTV very well, very well indeed.

Thanks! Will do!

I've had really good luck with my AKG 120 into a mixer. Which will also double as some great sounding audio into a Zoom call.

Glad it was helpful! We will have the website open soon to assist people better with that.

Thank you for the kind words! That could be tricky to find. Getting a small mixing board would be your best best, in our opinion.

Yeah!! For sure! I was harnessing some Cal!

A custom cable will be needed. We will have them on sale soon at www.HRTVshop.com

@@HamRadioTV I see all your connector cables are sold out. Do you plan to have them for sale again.

Yes, agreed. Kevin misspoke and was trying to generally explain what people can and can not hear coming out of their radio's speaker.

That was a Behringer Xenyx 502.

lol, no joke!

In what way is showing the frequency range of the Human voice on a spectrum Wrong. Please teach us all. For all the Ham people out there wasting money on expensive microphones just remember most tranceivers have a passband of 30hz to 3khz and this is where the most intelligible voice sounds are, so paying through the nose for a microphone that has a frequency response outside this range is a total waste of money.

There is nothing wrong with showing the response of the human voice on an RTA; mis-stating the response is wrong. Think about it, if the response of the male voice is 60-180Hz or whatever he said and the female voice 100-270 or what ever, then neither voice could be heard over a telephone (300 -3,000Hz). The RTA clearly shows that the response of both voices extends up way above 4kHz. For mics, a good, flat response dynamic mic is more than enough for the limited bandwidth of the radio. And no, you can’t drive nails with a SM-57 - that honor belongs to the EV-664, the “Buchanan Hammer”.

@@kendickensheets9522 I think they were talking about the fundamental frequencies of speech,the fundamental frequency of the complex speech tone - also known as the pitch - lies in the range of 100-120 Hz for men, but variations outside this range can occur. The frequency for women is found approximately one octave higher. For children, its is around 300 Hz. As you mentioned correctly the average person can't hear these frequencies and telephones wouldn't even relay them. Totally agree 300hz to 3000hz is all that's needed for radio communications using voice, unless its FM stereo and music obviously.

Thank you @kdkshts for watching. Could you give more details? This was just a generalization to expand peoples knowledge in the HOBBY. I'm not sure if you are aware, but Kevin and I are not College Professors.

@@HamRadioTV Nor am I a college professor but I am an acoustician and know a little about sound. . . The frequency response of the normal speaking human voice is 125Hz (average) to 8kHz for men, 200-8K for women and 300-8k for children. The lowest octave within these ranges is where the fundamental sounds of the voice are produced. For men that would be 125-250Hz, women 200-300Hz and children 300-600Hz. Vowel sounds occur from roughly 500Hz to 1,000Hz and consonant sounds from roughly 500Hz to 4kHz. When whispering or yelling, the fundamental frequency and overall response changes somewhat. Within this range of 125Hz to 8kHz, the most important frequency band which determines speech intelligibility is the octave band centered at 2,000Hz or from 1,500Hz to 3,000Hz. The pass-band for telephone or radio operation (except for music/FM systems) is 300Hz to 3kHz. It follows then that a microphone with essentially flat response within this pass-band is essential to pick up and reproduce speech with good intelligibility. Almost any good quality microphone will easily be able to achieve this whether it is a dynamic or condenser type. Assuming that either type will have the required response, then there are other factors which should be considered and which can have a greater impact on the intelligibility and quality of the transmitted speech. One factor is polar response or directionality of the microphone. There are three basic types of polar responses available. They are cardioid (and variations including hyper-cardioid and “shot-gun”), bi-polar (picks up from the front and back, rejects sounds from the side), and omni-directional (picks up equally from all directions). There are variations on these such as noise cancelling and other specialty types). A major factor is the electrical output level of the microphone. The nominal output level of a typical dynamic mic is -50dBm whereas for a condenser mic, because it has active amplification circuitry in it, is -30dBm. This higher output level can easily overdrive the input circuitry of many radios and cause distortion or a “splattering” sound when ever any loud speech or other sound is produced. If you are in a noisy or reverberant (echoey) room, you will want a mic which will pick-up your voice primarily and reject the other sounds in the room. The choice is the cardioid or hyper-cardioid. If the need was to pick up two people facing each other in conversation, then the bi-polar microphone would be the best choice assuming the room is quiet and not reverberant. If it is noisy or reverberant then two cardioid mics feeding into a mixer would be a better choice. A quiet and relatively “dead” room is the best choice. Listen to your room - can you hear the heater or air-conditioner running, does it sound more like your shower or more like a quiet living room. Cardioid microphones have a characteristic called “proximity effect” which increases the low-frequency response the closer your mouth is to the microphone (this is why singers usually prefer a cardioid mic). For most cardioid mics this proximity effect occurs below 300Hz and only within 2”-3” of the mic. Adding a good foam windscreen to the mic tends to keep your mouth a little further away from it and reduces the proximity effect. The windscreen also reduces the “P-pop” sound which, even though lower than the response of the radio, can still overload the input circuitry of the mic preamp and cause distortion. The bottom line is that a good quality, cardioid dynamic microphone will perform just as good as a cardioid condenser mic for ham radio use. However, talking into a fancy condenser mic on an articulating boom with an external mesh metal screen is a lot more fun.