It's a mistake to think that a tone deaf person has any trouble zero beating. It just isn't so. That's because the frequency of the tones is immaterial.
The "trick" is to know how to hear the beat note. One doesn't care what the frequency of the signal is or whether it's any where near the sidetone note frequency. Most people I've worked with face-to-face have had a large light bulb go off over their heads and shouted a huge "AHA!!!" when they finally heard the beat note and discovered they needed to complete ignore the sidetone and the signal when zero beating. The problem is that almost always the person doesn't have the volume of the sidetone and the signal at the same level. They must be at the same level to produce the loudest beat note. The further off they are the weaker the beat note becomes until it's lost among the other sidetone and signal note, which one needs to ignore completely! Once they hear the beat note, they just tune in the direction that makes it decrease in frequency until it drops to a very low, "whump-whump-whump" sound and finally stops altogether. That's zero beat. With the 10 Hz tuning steps of the K2, sometimes one can't find exact zero beat, but a "whump-whump" going at, say, five whumps/second means you are only 5 Hz off of the other station's frequency. Zero beating has *nothing* to do with matching tones. A musician might say that at zero beat the tones are matched, but zero beating allows the most completely tone deaf person to get on frequency without a concern. BTW, I agree with Gary, N7HTS. I prefer the way we did it year ago, but that requires a receiver that will produce output when the BFO and carrier are within a few Hz of each other, at least. Most modern transceivers, including the Elecraft rigs, have virtually no output within 100 Hz or so of the carrier frequency, thanks to the excellent I.F. filters they use. That makes finding zero beat with the sidetone mandatory to avoid an error or 100 Hz or more in trying to tune onto the other station's frequency. Ron AC7AC _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
