I put an HC-5 in the stock President hand mic housing, and it didn't have enough gain to modulate the radio well. It sounded fine, but didn't have enough oomph to get full output from the rig. Might work better with an amplified mic housing, but I ended up just going with a stock mobile D104 in it's place.
The HC-5 has good, full range sound unlike the HC-4, which is extremely limited in range in order tp maximize the punch for pile ups. Keep in mind that the HC-5 is a close talker!
73,
Brett
Thanks that is useful information for sure! Maybe I will just use it as a base mic since I have eq, noise gate, tube pre-amp etc....This way if it does need some amplification I already have it on hand. Yes with the low level modulation on the HRXXXX series and the like it does like a hotter dynamic mic gain wise. That is why so many people when I was in high school ran power mics on them. Back in 1991 the hot setup was the Minute Man D104M6 from Astatic. Obviously you did not need to turn the gain up much on the mic.
The only power mics I have are old Electro Voice and Shure hand mics and those have pretty good mic cartridges in them and they are all NOS. The Electro Voices are from Aviation they have built in amp and dynamic cartridges designed to be powered by the aircraft's Nav/Comm system. Not sure if they top out at 5Khz or 7Khz on those. The Shures I am not sure what they where designed for but they too have built in amp and dynamic element designed to be powered by the pa or radio they are plugged into. Well I have some old NOS Radio Shack pre-amped mics but those use tiny dynamic element if I am remembering right and I do not think I could fit the HC-5 in those housing. On top of that the Radio Shack power mics have some pretty aggressive noise filtering going on they sound slightly better than a Road Devil but still a little tinny.
I prob. will not be able to fit it in a high end mic body I will prob. need to use a regular mic body either something like a coffin style or a SRA198 etc.....Something with a fairly large mic cartridge but not a cartridge that is also part of the external mic body.
The Electro Voice 60X series the part with the lip guard and round external shape is actually the mic cartridge. The round external part is not part of the mic body it is actually part of the cartridge itself. If you had one that was not working you could cut it in half and re-stuff it but you would not want to cut a perfectly good working cartridge since they are pretty good as they are.
The Shures I have have very thin element it is almost as big as a D104 element but very thin.
I am sure if I dig enough I will find one that will be a nice fit. I just do not want to damage a fantastic mic just to stuff this in it. I have an old Astatic base mic has the SSB style deep head and no electronics at all in the base. It is in rough shape but that would have space to spare. I was going to toss a laboratory grades small diaphragm electret mic cartridge in it.
I was going to use the OEM mic becasue it is almost 20 years old and figured it was not great loss losing the OEM cartridge. Well I do not intend to die just yet so I have time I guess to find the right application for it!
So I either need a radio with really hot audio to start with or I am going to need to amplify the signal from the HC-5. I am not willing to increase the gain with component swaps or additions inside the Lincoln. I do have extra audio amps for it but prefer not to have to use them.
