Can You Hear Me Now? Tips and Tools to Help Ham Radio Operators Affected by Hearing Loss

For years, my wife has questioned my hearing quality. I always dismissed it jokingly as “selective hearing.” It wasn’t until I noticed it affecting my ham radio operations that I began to take her seriously.

I say this jokingly, but it’s a fact: With age we start to lose our senses to one degree or another. And this can be compounded by what we have exposed our senses to over the years.

For years, I ran around the state in either a fire truck, ambulance, or police car with the siren blaring, never giving a thought to hearing protection. And what was one of my main hobbies at that time? Competitive shooting. What could go wrong, being in confined spaces with high-decibel noise for extended periods of time over the course of 30 years?

So, I admit that I have some degree of hearing loss. And it really is affecting my ability to pull out some weak signals over the air. Who wants to be the operator who needs to ask their contacts their call sign 12 times? So, I began exploring options.

I obtained some hearing aids. This helped immensely, but as you know when you amplify the good receive signal, you also amplify the noise. Some of it can be filtered out, but not all of it. I began my quest to lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Let me share a few steps I took to accomplish this.

The first thing I did was to get a good headset. I tried a commercial broadcast headset, which was good, but the cable arrangement was not conducive to my body shape. When I turned my head, it would knock the earpiece from my ear with my shoulder. Then I tried the Heil PRO 7 Headset.

Heil Pro 7 Headset — Heil PRO 7 Headset (Image/Heil Sound)

The cable came off the earpiece at an angle avoiding my shoulder. I considered the fact that it stayed on my head a win. Beyond that, it was very lightweight and had plenty of adjustments to make it feel good. It was full stereo with balance control to allow me to listen to both VFOs in my radio simultaneously and adjust which one was louder. And finally, it has a phase reversal switch which is sometimes like magic when digging out a weak signal.

Next, I took a deep dive into the equalizer setting on my Yaesu FTDX-101MP and Yaesu FTDX-10. I watched videos and read information on how to tailor the sound to my hearing ranges. This was a great learning experience and really helped me with the way I hear my transceivers. I highly recommend that everyone who has a rig with equalizer settings do this.

In addition to the equalizer settings, it is vital to learn about the filtering built into your radio. In my mind, more is better, but that only applies to grandma’s biscuits and gravy. If you turn on too much internal filtering, you will distort the sound and filter out good signals. The Radio Today Guides from the Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) have been critical tools for learning about the settings on my rigs. They do a great job of explaining each setting and giving you a starting point.

Next, I decided to install a DX Engineering Receive Short Element Active Vertical Antenna (RSEAV). This is a low-to-ground receive-only antenna. It has a low third order intercept and is useful on 40 kHz to 30 MHz. You do need a means to add a dedicated receive antenna to your transceiver.

I used the DX Engineering NCC-2 Receive Antenna Phasing System to integrate the RSEAV into my setup. This allowed me to phase the RSEAV against my main transmit antenna to null out some of the noise. Plus, it lets me add up to three additional RSEAV antennas in the future if I desire.

DX Engineering NCC-2 Noise Cancelling module — (Image/DX Engineering)

DX Engineering offers a variety of audio-enhancing devices from manufacturers including bhi (digital sound processing (DSP) noise-canceling modules and speakers, parametric equalizers); Heil Sound (microphones, parametric receive audio equalizers, speakers, HT headsets); SOTAbeams (WOLFWAVE Advanced Audio Processor); and others.