RadioBanter - View Single Post - SUPER J-POLE BEATS YAGI BY 1 dB

February 8th 05, 08:50 PM

On 07/02/2005 4:52 PM, wrote:
Richard Clark wrote:

On 7 Feb 2005 01:44:10 -0800, wrote:

Come listen for yourself...

????? Volume has nothing to do with this!

You could throw a dead carrier and still
have an idea of how close to full quieting you
are....

Obviously your hearing perception exceeds the characteristics of a
larger part of mankind. This makes any claims for someone ELSE to
listen to the difference even more problematic.

Hearing is the poorest measure second only to "seeing" for one self.
Leave this type of testimonial for the Sunday services.

A good receiver actually gives you
TONS of information. You can hear overmodulation,
sideband "splatter" to adjacent channels,
spurious oscillations on other channels,
dead carrier hum in your signal, the overall
intelligibility of your signal and the audio frequency
response (roughly). No field strength meter can
tell you this information!

Bottom line is, human hearing is
the ultimate destination. It can
be more qualitative that quantity.

However, it is exactly these aspects that make human hearing terrible
for side-by-side comparisons like the one initially described by the OP.

There are plenty examples of double-blind tests that indicate that the
participating observer often makes the worst sort of qualitative judgements.

Human judgement is a useful tool, especially when trying to understand
the hard-to-quantify. However, I find it dubious that anyone has ears
good enough to hear the quality of an audio signal that is the result of
+- 1dB of RF gain presented to the front-end. (This is not to say I
think that the OP only used this method to get his/her results.
Clearly, the OP used some sort of methodology to obtain the +1dB gain
claim. I only suggest that we should be critical of qualitative
results that back up the results we want.)

Results to the contrary from a proper double-blind test backed up by
multiple datasets based on what we /can/ measure would convince me
otherwise.

A better qualitative test would be to simply live with the antenna for a
few weeks, and see what DX one could pull in. Again, totally
unscientific; but this is what average radiopersons (like me, I'm
afraid!) have been doing for decades now.

I look at this sort of thing as an example of the "right tool for the
right job."