I've been spending quite a bit of time on 26.805 FM lately. Conditions this past weekend were pretty good but I've noticed that A LOT of people using FM mode are over-deviating. That is, they have cranked the audio gain up way to high. Now on AM mode this might make you loud and proud, but on FM it just makes you a garbled noisy unlistenable mess. There was a station in upstate New York dominating the channel on Saturday morning with a huge but almost completely unintelligable signal. It's too bad because the guy would have sounded amazing with about half the audio level he was running!!
My 6666 in my car has an especially hard time with these over-deviated FM signals, and there's a lot of those radios out there in use.
So for those of you running FM, do yourselves a favor and keep the audio levels within spec..... if you're not sure where to set them use another radio or an online SDR to monitor your signal, and set the level where the audio doesn't distort. On FM mode you're actually much better off with less audio than more, quite the opposite of AM and SSB. And remember, there's no swing in FM mode, it's all carrier.
My 6666 in my car has an especially hard time with these over-deviated FM signals, and there's a lot of those radios out there in use.
So for those of you running FM, do yourselves a favor and keep the audio levels within spec..... if you're not sure where to set them use another radio or an online SDR to monitor your signal, and set the level where the audio doesn't distort. On FM mode you're actually much better off with less audio than more, quite the opposite of AM and SSB. And remember, there's no swing in FM mode, it's all carrier.
