I don¡¯t have a sBitx but do suffer from age related hearing loss. ?This is a very welcome kind of work. ?I would welcome someone to offer a reasonably expensed adaptor to any receiver to adjust for hearing deficits with separate adjustment for each ear. I don¡¯t have much difficulty with CW but with voice SSB especially from foreign amateurs I have significant difficulty getting call signs accurately.?
The various adaptors and programs on the APP site of my iPhone only work for music and programs that I have saved in my iPhone but there is nothing that allows all audio output to be adapted to my hearing loss.?
My expensive hearing aids do have an equalizer on my iPhone but it¡¯s tacky and isn¡¯t separately adjustable for each ear. ?I only wish I still had one of those audio equalizers that we used in our stereos back in the day¡. Sometimes 8 or more frequency channels. ?Back then it was ALL ABOUT THE BASS. ?Ha! ?Now it¡¯s in the speech frequencies that I have difficulty. ?When one of those kids with the loud music drives by all I hear is the bass and it blocks everything else. ?How times change.?
Dave K8WPE since 1960?
David J. Wilcox¡¯s iPad
Traverse City, Michigan
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On Feb 28, 2024, at 7:59?PM, Gordon Gibby <docvacuumtubes@...> wrote:
?I am at the beginning stages of a lot of FUN with the sBitx that has direct application to helping hams with older-age hearing deficits.? ? Our High School is holding a Science Fair in about a month, and I have engaged the AP Precalculus students -- three young ladies, of 10th and 11th grade -- into an experiment to test mathematical modification of the audio bandpass to correct or mitigate old-age high frequency hearing loss.
Since their work this year involves both logarithms (hence, dBs) and sinewaves in trigonometry (hence frequencies)? this is a very practical set of problems for them to tackle --
But in the process I realized how the sBitx is a perfect vehicle for easily adapting to physical frailties of hearing.? ?My software is terribly primitive, but I am emphasizing and de-emphasizing various portions of the human-hearing bandwidth at will within the software to accomplish the goal of demonstrating mitigation of sensory-neural high frequency hearing loss.? ?There are very expensive products on the market to do exactly the SAME THING for aging amateur radio operators -- but inside the sBitx it is done for free with a few additional lines of code!? ? I have at least a couple of people in our local volunteer group who clearly have hearing difficulties (it is obvious) but they aren't yet acknowledging their difficulties in catching callsigns etc.? ? A device such as the sBitx that offered OPTIONS for mitigation might be a nice thing for such hams!
My code is
terribly primitive (I ran into problems just trying to read in a command, of all things!? Works with one line, and fails with another....frustrating) -- but the manipulation of the audio is working and although KLUNKY, is sufficient for our current experiment.? ?This can be expanded into a full senory-neural-hearing loss mitigation solution.
Gordon KX4Z
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These are advanced high school students (non-amateurs) busy grabbing the microphone and talking nonsense words on 3.9MHz into a closed system with 50dB of attenuation between a low-drive-power sBitx transmitter with emphasis of high frequencies in the SSB path....going to another sBitx that has "old-age-ear simulation" with decrement of high frequencies (about 20dB -- fairly moderate hearing loss beginning at 1kHz) and in the face of a calibrated amount of white Gaussian Noise created in the audio path by the WINLINK IONOS simulator? ()? -- which uses a Teensy to A/D the input audio and constantly adjusts the added white noise to maintain a desired Signal To Noise ratio.? ?The students found 10dB SNR plenty challenging to themselves!!? ?(I would have thought it was easy.....the paper that we reviewed had Chinese subjects working through SNR of -5 dB!!)? ? Although they have little to NONE background in electronics, they very quickly grasped the functions of each black-box and moved to create informal testing with a bit of guidance from me.? ?This is amateur radio serving student education.? ? And all because of the sBitx.
<trialtxrxsbitx.c>
