mic for Yeticom Optima

Any decent power mics for Optima mk3? Chinese HM-36 fairly good when modded. Stock mic...well... opened up the little mic hole, big improvement but...
They both seem/sound "underpowered" on ssb (4-6 watts on normal talking, mig gain and power on max, touching 30 when whistling loud)
Wired up a k-po nm532 : did not sound good, low modulation.
Reading all forums on web but seems no conclusion on the mic quest...
Anyone uses optima here with other than stock mic and is happy with it? :-) Please share....
Or is this the wrong approach? Increase the ssb power?

Hi I’ve a mk2 stock mic seems poor as same boat as you I think

rockshelter wrote:

Any decent power mics for Optima mk3? Chinese HM-36 fairly good when modded. Stock mic...well... opened up the little mic hole, big improvement but...
They both seem/sound "underpowered" on ssb (4-6 watts on normal talking, mig gain and power on max, touching 30 when whistling loud)
Wired up a k-po nm532 : did not sound good, low modulation.  
Reading all forums on web but seems no conclusion on the mic quest...
Anyone uses optima here with other than stock mic and is happy with it? :-) Please share....
Or is this the wrong approach? Increase the ssb power?

Unless you're using a power meter with a proper peak hold function that uses a circuit which needs power to run then your meter isn't giving you a true reading for the power output on SSB. You need to use a peak hold meter because the peaks are so short in duration that the needle can't react fast enough when you're measuring it whilst talking.

Here's a Youtube video I did showing the difference measuring SSB power when using a proper peak hold meter with an active circuit and one without peak hold or the mickey mouse type that just use a capacitor or similar. Sorry for it being a bit ranty, it was in response to people banging on about the TS590 having low output power when it didn't but the reason they refused to believe that was because they were using the wrong type of meter to measure SSB.



The fact that when you whistle you're getting 30W proves the mics have enough drive to reach peak power. Getting a power mic will not make any difference other than making you sound worse.

Because of how SSB works it is impossible to have low modulation, all you'll do when you reduce mic gain is lower the power. The ones that sound loud do so because they're over-driving and the "loud" is actually distortion.

Northern Crusader, thank you for clarification on this - I agree with all you said. Of course "low modulation" on ssb is a silly statement. I might have mixed in the process fm/am testing in this without saying :-) I think this is also a "gut" feeling - as in when you use different radios and mics and constantly observe the same power meter on all of them and its reading it doesent take long to get a "feeling" of what comes out of the radio. I have compared the Optima to maybe 10-12 other radios, both export, hf rigs and so on - the optima just does not give out what you would expect from this box power wise. The same was the case for a decent HF rig yaesu ft-847. Just did not push the output much. An external equalizer/compressor/gain box together with a better yaesu mic produced a very different result and much better reports. So I am sure what we experience with the yeti is true. And it does not seem to handle any external processing of the audio, its just the same.