When I picked up my FTdx101MP radio I also treated myself to the Yaesu flagship mic, the “Reference M-1”. It’s an amazing mic that’s highly configurable and I have high hopes and expectations for it. Afterall, it cost as much as some complete HF radios at £700 a pop!!!

As can be seen from the above photograph, the base of the mic has all of the setting controls and it is somewhat complicated to say the least. Yesterday I had a Very helpful QSO with YL3BF, Janis, over in Latvia. Unlike most operators Janis gave me a very honest signal report and told me that my audio was terrible! Not what you want to hear with a £700 mic but it was something I was starting to suspect myself.

So, yesterday afternoon my “mission” was to resolve this. I started by sitting and watching a stack of YouTube videos showing how others had configured their M-1 mics and then I moved on to reading the manual (yes, I do read manuals!!) for both the radio and the mic and then I set about systematically configuring both the radio and mic to work together. This involved taking everything back to a basic level, plugging headphones in and making small adjustments and seeing if it improved the audio output or not. If it did make an improvement I moved on to the next change and repeated the process until I was happy with the results. Finally, I fired up my SDRPlay radio, turned the RF power on the Yaesu down to 5watts and did some direct, over the air listening to my output.

Altogether it must have taken 3 or 4 hours to carry out this, but I am as confident as I can be at this stage that I am starting to get the audio levels and quality from my setup that I am looking for and that I expected.

I guess the next phase is to carry out some real world testing and ask for some “honest” audio reports from people.