I’ve had several people ask me recently about squelch on their wireless mics. Squelch is an important factor in radio transmission and must be utilized correctly if you intend to use wireless mics in a sound system. Wireless mics are highly susceptible to interference from other radio transmissions and setting the proper squelch is just as important as ensuring your frequencies match on your transmitter and receiver.
Squelch means to “to completely suppress”. Its function is to mute the audio output of the receiver when the radio signal falls out of an acceptable range. Without a signal to “latch” onto the open receiver may pick up another signal or radio noise from somewhere else. This is typically heard as “white” noise and is often much louder than the audio signal from the desired frequency. As you can imagine, we don’t want to hear unexpected white noise over any loud PA system. HAM and CB radio operators are familiar with adjusting their squelch on their radio receivers to ensure clear communication and to prevent the same white noise from playing back through their receiver.
We can easily adjust the squelch on wireless mics with just a few steps. Most setting can be adjusted in the main menu or the near the same menu as the frequency settings. In some cases the squelch might be a physical knob which can be found on the back of the wireless receiver unit. Check with your owners manual or manufacturer for specific steps regarding your wireless unit.
Shure provides these steps for their wireless systems.
- Set the receiver volume control to minimum to avoid excessive noise in the sound system.
- Turn the receiver power on.
- Observe the RF and audio indicators on the receiver.
- If the indicators are showing a no-signal condition the squelch setting may be left as-is.
- If the indicators are showing a steady or intermittent signal-received condition increase the squelch control setting until a no-signal condition is indicated. Set the squelch control slightly past this point to provide a threshold margin.
- If the no-signal condition cannot be achieved even with high squelch settings it may be possible to find and eliminate the undesirable signal. Otherwise it may be necessary to select a different operating frequency.
- Turn the transmitter power on.
- Make sure that the receiver indicates a signal-received condition with the transmitter at normal operating distance.
Home theater component and 7.1 surround systems have been lacking for years due to having to sacrifice quality for the ease of wireless transmission. This is still not fast enough to comfortably support live performance or studio applications such as in-ear monitors or audio hardware where engineers rely on zero latency. However, quality wireless transmission of multi channel audio with zero latency is not too far away. Obviously this is great if you rely on Bluetooth solely for data transferring. Sending wirelessly between computers or from your camera to laptop can now be accomplished in half the time.
systems and sound systems that were installed by a contractor tend to have affected equipment even if it was installed after the FCC’s announcement. This is likely due to supply houses and contractors trying to unload inventory before they themselves end up with nothing much more than an expensive paper weight. I saw this with the 700MHz reallocation a few years ago and am seeing it again now. Make sure to check you wireless frequencies and budget to replace if needed. Luckily the 3 largest manufactures offer trade-in rebates on affected wireless systems. You must have proof of purchase and file for the trade-in rebate before the deadline. Sennheiser’s deadline is June 30th, 2018 and Shure’s deadline is July 30th, 2018. Audio Technica’s deadline for rebate is set for sometime in 2019. You can refer to each manufacturer on trade-in specifics and how to collect your rebate.
Navigate to the root of your site usually contained within the “public_html” folder. You will see a list of files and folders including WP-Content, wp-config.php and others as previously discussed. Make sure you highlight all the files and then drag them to your desktop. This process of downloading can take some time. If you have a lot of pictures and media rich pages than this could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. After you have your files downloaded, back them up to external hard disks or optical media such as burnable DVD’s. Checkout my post on 
I suggest doing it from directly within phpMyAdmin which is a program that will be running on your web host. We can usually log into it at your web host provider such as GoDaddy or HostGator and find it under the database sections. Downloading the database will render a small SQL document which will look like a text or notepad file. It contains very important code which will include all of your pages, posts, comments, and user data. It is recommended that you backup this file at least once a month or more frequently if you consistently update your site.
