strange, I bought three volvos over thirty years from keystone, never had an issue.
I found their service department was just terrible, not so much on capability, but on customer service. When you buy a car there, they sell you hard on the fact that they'll come retrieve your car, give you a loaner, and then bring your car back when it's done. But we found that it was nearly impossible to actually schedule this service less than
3 weeks in advance! When there's something wrong with the car, I can't usually wait 3 weeks to have a tech even take a first look at it.
If you take the car to them, they're a bit quicker, but still usually several days or a week out if you need a loaner car.
They hand out their loaner cars with
empty fuel tanks, which is the opposite of literally every other dealership I've ever encountered. So surprise... you make the long trip down to D-town before work one morning to drop off your car, pick up a loaner, and then get hit with the surprise that the damn thing is running out of fuel in your rush to get to work!
Also, they have the oldest and dirtiest loaner cars I have ever seen anywhere, bar none. Like "put down plastic, and then wash your hands when you get out," dirty. One we got smelled like a hobo had been living in it, and I don't think any one of them have ever been cleaned, ever.
Frustrated with Keystone, I took our V50 to Wynn Volvo for a crankcase breather repair, and they kept the damn car for
10 days. They actually had the nerve to call us back and request that we return their loaner car, while they still had our car, because they had promised the loaner to another customer.
That was when I started telling my wife that her next car wasn't going to be a Volvo, unless she wanted to fight these dealers on her own.
At the time, we were mostly buying Mercedes, Audi, and Jaguar, and all had much better service, despite the Volvo being in the same price range as the cars we owned from any of those brands. But here's the thing, I also get better service from my lowly Dodge dealer! Much better, in fact.
244DL sedan, 740 turbo wagon, recently an XC60 off lease.
lol... I had 240, 740 turbo, and V50 T5 R-Design. Looked at V60 to replace the V50, when we were done with that car, but dealer frustration caused us to switch brands.
If they'd still made a sporty turbo wagon with manual transmission, I might have continued fighting with Keystone and Wynn Volvo. But any incentive to do so went away when they dropped manual transmission from their lineup.
Zigmunt Motors still in Doylestown.
I spent many after-school hours jumping my BMX bike off the ramp that leads up into their shop, until Ziggy would get tired of hearing us kids and chase us off.
My concern with noise is on the receiving end of my station if I am understanding you correctly. When I turn on my equipment, if the noise level is really high I just turn everything back off again.
Noise comes from resistance or heat. That can be anythng from resistors intentially placed in the circuit to reduce signal level, to a loose or failing connector that's causing poor contact. Resistance at the output of a system is usually not a huge problem, since the desired signal level is large compared to any noise produced, and the noise is not being subsequently "gained up" by the amplifier. But any noise generated upstream of your transmitter amplifier is going to be "gained up" by the amplifier, and come out at much higher power.
As to whether any of this matters in your application, I have no idea. I'm a "design guy", not an "applications guy".
Although my Icom IC7610 can dig out a signal that is at noise level. But for pure operating enjoyment I hate listening to all of that.
Sometimes, that's all it comes down to.
Back when I was playing in bands, I remember musicians would look at those large audio mixing boards, and wonder why there's a gain knob on the pre-amp for each microphone or instrument, then another gain knob on each channel input to mixer, then an attenuator knob on each channel output, another attenuator knob on mixer output, sometimes even with another "final gain" knob on the mixer, and then more gain knobs on each amplifier. With 4 stages of gain knobs and 3 stages of attenuators, it takes some gaming and talent to find the right setting for each, to put each of those amplification stages in their linear range and with minimum system noise. It's honestly beyond me, how those guys achieve that!
I suspect most ham setups have only two knobs, one in the transmitter/modulator, and a second on the final amplifier. Right? Probably much easier setup, but still leaves room to bias the system one way or the other (increase drive, lower amplification, or vice versa) to balance the opposing forces of pre-amp linearity and noise.
