Prais said:
I'm calling you on this. One thing was to be "more Catholic than the Pope" in the Phoenix discussion, as that is just "puffery" which is almost a badge of honor in our industry.
But it's another thing to, anonymously, claim to have verified more stations than 99% of all still-active DXers using a very rudimentary receiver. Most DXers who were principally active in the 50's and 60's never got that many, and here we are talking about active radio club members who were part of tip exchanges and who achieved perhaps a quarter of all loggings and veries from club-specific DX Test notifications and frequency checks.
The "best" of the DXers from the 60's on had National HRO's and Hammarlund HQ180's in the 60's, often modified with Q Multipliers and such, using tiltable loops and such. From the late 60's into the 70's the R390 with its mechanical filters became the rig of choice, using phased arrays and such. A high percentage of most DXers' loggings were foreign, most on what we called back then "split frequencies." An SX 99 could not DX such stations, save for a few very powerful ones as its selectivity was not sharp enough... indeed, not sharp enough to get in to adjacents to larger local signals.
DXing with the WRTH as you mentioned was nearly impossible, as the book was never accurate, complete or particularly helpful for MW DX. The Broadcasting Yearbook was used by some of us to get addresses, but not for much else... the Jones Log kept us through the mid-80's in its 18 editions. But after that time, the NRC Log and the NRC night pattern book were the key guides to domestic DX, and international loggings were aided by the club International sections like IDXD.
Pardon me if I am a skeptic. This just does not ring true. Over the years, MW DXers in North America went through a few "Bud Bartos" (those real DXers of the 60's will know the name and the famous incidents) who claimed fantastic catches... so we know how the duck walks and quacks.
