Down the well?

[FireFoxDown]

Ok, not exactly a life-altering question but could of you kind ladies and gentleman tell me why when sometimes talking to ATC on the phone(Just having a chat, y'know!) it sounds like they are very far away (hence the connotation to "wells" as above) ? :D

[aluminium persuader]

Dunno, really.

At my place, though, when a call is patched through to a console it is really faint and I have to turn the volume up full to hear them (unless it's my wife, when I don't even need the headset!). Blows my head off when an a/c calls, though.

Could really be down to a lot of things - distance of mic from mouth, age/type of equip etc.

Ding dong dell - that's about all I can offer! :)

ap

[FireFoxDown]

lol! :D

Ok, thanks for that! Could be the age of equipment in this place(South East) - excellent bunch, usually calling us to remind us our plans are about to drop out unless we put in a DLA! :O

[aluminium persuader]

;)

That's us - good eggs all round
Heads in the clouds
But feet on the ground!

Poet laureate of Pprune! (not!)

Don't forget to round out now, y'hear?

ap.

:)

[FireFoxDown]

"Heads in the sky,
But feet on the ground."

I like that, classic! I wonder if there's a saying about Ops? Probably,but not repeatable in the company of gentlemen . . . :}

[ImageGear]

FireFoxDown

Patched line levels are occasionally unbalanced. Sounds like either the line gains between the receivers and the console are incorrect or the BT line levels to the console amps are incorrect. Get your techy to tweak them.

Imagegear

[The Great Unwashed]

I think the type of microphone in the headset may be significant in some cases. Last time I sat in on ATC, the sector controller at Manchester called and I had a hard time hearing him, very scratchy and faint sound because their headsets were fitted with magnetic mikes. There are mike preamplifiers on the RT circuits but not on the telephone and intercoms. A moving coil microphone offers some improvement, an elecret mike is better still but needs a small voltage to operate (incidentally most modern domestic and business phones have electret mikes).

Hope that's not too technical. I barely understand thse things myself ;) .