Total posts : 45366
I’ve been using a Talking House for about a year. I checked it’s output on a Motorola Station monitor and the output from the “external antenna tuner” jack was almost 100 milliwatts. The modulation runs up to about 98% and then hard limits.
Out of the box it’s fairly simple to use as it has a built in auto-antenna tuner that works with the wire antenna supplied with the unit. On the wire antenna at 1500 khz, the solid range was about 1/4 mile with the transmitter/antenna on the second floor inside a frame house. Beyond that the signal drops quickly.
Using the external antenna jack feeding a 3 meter vertical the usable range was almost doubled. The antenna was ground mounted with practically no radial system. I’m sure with some effort put into the antenna system, the range could be much better.
The internal RAM audio recorder/player can store about five minutes of program. It must be a fairly low sample/bit rate as the audio is only suitable for voice. There is also a “live” audio input which when fed with good audio, sounds fairly good. There does seem to be some very low frequency carrier shift when modulated. Wether or not it’s acceptable is subjective.
I got a deal! I bid at the last second on Ebay and got it brand new for $9.95 plus shipping. Seems it was listed under some obscure listing. No one else bid on it. If you get a good deal like that, it’s worth it.
I have a Metzo also and the Talking House beats the Metzo on output power and ease of use. The Metzo has a nice audio section (gain, compression, limiting) but you’ll find yourself tinkering all the time to get a better sound. Besides, I use ZaraRadio automation which has an excellent audio processor so the Talking House doesn’t have to do any processing.
Talking House advertises a “remote” antenna system (antenna and tuner) but I’ve yet to get a response from them regarding pricing. Some would say it’s illegal under Part 15 but buried in the rules there is a section that states when designed as a system, it’s OK. I’m sure this will be argued at length. In fact the rule goes so far as to say that an external amplifier can be used at the antenna as long as the input power does not exceed the 100 mw limit.
That should open a can of discussion.
