Andy,

Thanks for your response. I guess I'm looking for a magic pill (though
I know better). I agree that the human brain/ear combination is
unsurpassed in digging out the really weak ones or the weak signal our
of the pile up. My unfortunate situation is my degenerating hearing. I
now wear hearing aids in both ears and have difficulty understanding
spoken conversation no matter what the volume level. I have always been
a CW only operator so the loss of SSB use doesn't seem so bad. I can
copy CW much better than listen to voices, but I can never be sure that
I can still dig the weak signals out of the mud and I'm pretty sure I
have lost some ability to deal with pile-up QRM. So I'm grabbing at
straws for gizmos to help me out as my hearing digresses.

73 - Jeff - KA9S

On Nov 3, 6:27 am, "AndyS" wrote:
wrote:
Have any of you ever done this and how did it work out for you?

- Jeff
Andy writes: Jeff, I haven't tried this method, but one rule of thumb I have
always
believed in is:

"No matter how much you shift, limit, amplify or divide noise, it still
ends up as noise"

The only effective way I have ever found is to narrow the bandwidth
around the signal until the signal starts to get degraded. If done
digitally, it can be done by digital processing, but that changes only
the technique, not the principle...

So, while I would really like to try out some of these "improved
methods",
I am not confident enough in them to spend a weekend wiring together
some hardware.... In my younger years, I probly would've, tho....

Personally, as a CW operator of some 45 years, I have found that my
ears/brain does a lot better job of filtering than one would suppose,
especially
if I am copying some standard message where I sort of know the words
the other fellow will send. I only need 2 or 3 letters per word to
fill in
the pieces with devastating accuracy (grin).....

But, good luck on your efforts. If you do build up something, please

come back and post it here. I am sure that there are many
experimenters who try something like that if someone thinks it shows
promise..... But, please, take some actual measurements. And with
S/N ratios of around the 0 db level. My ear copy can still pick those

out, and many of the "processors" can't deal with noisy sigs in that
region....they tend to fall apart when anything below tangential
sensitivity is received....

Andy W4OAH in Eureka, Texas