so ive been on HF for about two years now, mostly digital modes and some CW, and i finally decided to actually sit down and get comfortable with SSB phone. my signal reports are all over the place. sometimes people say i sound great, other times im getting told im muffled or tinny or just generally bad. my radio is an IC-7300 and im using a Heil PR-40 into the front mic jack. i set the mic gain by the book, ALC sitting just barely moving, compression off for now.

the weird part is i recorded myself on my phone through the speaker and yeah it does sound kind of hollow? like theres a room reverb thing going on. my shack is a spare bedroom with hardwood floors and not a lot of furniture so maybe thats part of it. but also i wonder if my TX bandwidth settings are off. i havent really dug into the equalizer settings on the 7300 yet and i know that radio has a bunch of adjustments i havent touched.

anyone gone through this with the 7300 specifically or just with SSB audio in general? i feel like theres a lot of tribal knowledge around getting a good SSB signal that never really gets written down anywhere obvious.

the room acoustics thing is real and most people completely ignore it. hardwood floors and bare walls will absolutely kill your audio — youre basically broadcasting in a bathroom. even throwing a rug down or having some bookshelves with stuff on them makes a noticeable difference. the PR-40 is a good mic but its a large diaphragm condenser and it picks up everything, so a reflective room is gonna be very obvious with that mic.

on the 7300 specifically, dig into the menu and look at the TX tone settings. theres a parametric EQ in there and the defaults are honestly fine for some people but not for everyone depending on your voice. i ended up boosting around 2-3kHz slightly and rolling off some of the low end because my voice is naturally pretty bassy and it was getting muddy. also make sure your TX bandwidth isnt set too narrow — some people accidentally have it set to like 1.8kHz or something which just sounds awful. i run mine at 2.4kHz for general ragchewing and bump it up to 2.8 when the band is quiet and i want it to sound nicer.

the ALC barely moving thing is right, dont chase high ALC. and yeah leave the speech processor off until you actually understand what its doing to your signal, its easy to overdo it and sound crunchy.

get a WebSDR recording of yourself, thats the real test. phone speaker monitoring is useless for this. find a WebSDR thats close enough to hear you and have someone key up while you transmit a test message. youll hear exactly what others hear and it changed everything for me when i first started on phone. i was shocked how different my perception of my own audio was vs what was actually going out.