WNB Revisited

Burch - K4QXX

I have been vocal in the past about the NB in the 6000 series.  I still have my Flex-5000 and the NB is very good.  I have never had good luck with the NB in the 6000 series.  When the WNB was introduced, I tried it on 160 meters and it wasn't effective.  It did seem to work OK on 6 meters.

Fast foreword to this weekend.  I was playing around with a new Yaesu FT-991 I purchased for my RV and thought I would play around with the contest this weekend.  I tuned to 20 meters and I had a S9 power line noise.  I hit the NB on the Yaesu and it didn't do much.  I then hooked my antenna back to the 6500 and again very high powerline noise.  I turned on the WNB and slide the slider to about 90 and BOOM.  Noise lever went down 4 S units and the panadapter was full of signals.  With certain kinds of noise, the WNB can be very effective.  All the HF bands are noisy at my QTH this weekend and the WNB is doing a good job.  I have faith with a little tweaking (the science project) that the WNB will become better with time.

Burch

Walt - KZ1F

That's outstanding Burch! I am confident wnb works. I've seen it work twice at my location. I am, however, not convinced when I saw it work here there wasn't also injected a lot of distortion, as the settings both times was high 90's. I have not seen the dramatic results you described or the similarly dramatic results Lee chronicled in his videos. So, it appears I have the 'wrong' noise. I had been trying to get someone to describe the difference between what is the 'right' noise from the 'wrong' noise, to no avail. I am hopeful though that, going forward, Flex will tweak wnb such that more noise will fall into the 'right' category. As many have said wnb works great on the earlier Flex radios as well as those, you know, legacy radios with knobs and dials. So, I remain hopeful.

Mark_WS7M

I always seem to have the 'wrong' noise... sigh...

James Del Principe

Maybe Tim could join in and set us straight as I have not yet found it effective. I had (have) great hopes for WNB.   73, Jim

Tim - W4TME

I have covered this before, so I will provide the short version.

1.) Noise is a very complex waveform and is not easy to mitigate
2.) Noise can be classified into correlated and uncorrelated depending on its characteristics.
3.) Noise blankers work on correlated noise.  DSP noise reductions is for uncorrelated noise.
4.) WNB is most effective on well-correlated noise sources
5.) NB works better on less-correlated noise sources
6.) You may need to use both depending on your nose type
7.) There is no "silver bullet" noise mitigation feature.  A noise source may be so uncorrelated and random that neither WNB, NB or NR will be effective on it.
8.) Properly setting the AGC-T is also a very effective technique for reducing noise.

James Del Principe

Thanks for the great explanation, Tim. I understand this much better now. The noise at my QTH is more like a low level arcing or frying sound. The NR is most effective as is the AGC-T of course.     73, Jim