Brad N8YG has been reading over posts concerning the ssm2167 compression pre-amplifier with quite a bit of interest. So he finally integrated the board into his ubitx v5.
He put a trimmer on the output of the board, and potentiometers on the compression, and noise gates. The problem that he ran into was that on the air, rotating the 100K compression potentiometer had little to no effect. However he was getting compression that was clearly audible on the air.
He re-read the data sheet for the ssm2167 more thoroughly and found that the input voltage need to be quite low at -20 to -30 dBV. A quick check on the electret microphone output using the oscilloscope, showed a much higher output from his microphone.
This led to him adding another pot to trim the input voltage. He still needed the 5V to get to the electret so he wanted the trimmer after the 0.1 uF surface mount capacitor on the board.
Brad modded the board by removingthe 0.1 uf capacitor, and he made connections for the trimmer after the 0.1 uF capacitor.
The net result is a board with three additional potentiometers and one trimmer. The trimmer adjusts the output voltage, and potentiometers control the input voltage to the board, compression and noise gate.
On the air.. with the compression potentiometer turned down the rig sounds like it has no compression… while turning up the potentiometer makes a profound difference in on the air sound. The rig now has a LOT of punch and the power meter goes way up.
Brad believes that what was happening was that the input level was too high forcing the chip into the limiting portion of the transfer curve. Now that the chip is operating back in the linear portion, all is well!