Vic, get a Heil PR20. Much cheaper than the RE20 and to my ears almost no audible diff. If you or anyone else can afford an EV mic FB. But if you can't you can't. PR20 is excellent sub. Also the hardware to hold it is less $$ because for one thing, the mic is lighter weight. Bob's mics are slowly getting headway in broadcasting. Besides being a good mic, one reason the RE20 and 27 dominate AM broadcasting is intertia. Engineers and GMs and anyone else who makes purchase decisions are risk averse. I would be too. I would not want to risk trouble when I could simply buy old faithful. No one ever got fired for buying more of what works. But we're hams, it's okay to try to save some coin. You can go to the mic listening room
www.miclisteningroom.org (or maybe it is .com) and download and listen to files of dynamics that might interest you. It is a collection of sound bites where the only variable is the mic. They used as little audio gear as possible and had a professional announcer read copy on a bunch of different mics. It's a cheap way of hearing a lot of expensive and less expensive mics.
Blower noise: I could not operate without a noise gate. It is the only thing that keeps my Behringer 2496 in the audio chain. That box has the best noise gate (a.k.a. downward expander) I have ever used. If all else fails, get one used, just for that. All others I can hear it cutting in and out but this one is like it isn't there until I put it on bypass, which I occasionally do to show hams I'm working what they're missing. They always encourage me to put it back in
73
Rob
