Since I was only a 12 year old, it took some convincing my parents that watching "snow" on their TV wouldn't damage it. Think they figured I was nuts. And no matter how I much I begged, TV DXing would stop with the 5PM news each evening.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Even after I discovered DXing in the early 70s, I felt strange and alone because none of my friends were interested as hard as I tried to get them interested.
I especially remember when my father put a big TV antenna on our roof for me so I could see the New York stations from 80 miles away in south Jersey. The wire went into my room at first but I only had a black and white TV so he ran the 300 ohm wire down into the den where our color TV was and put a device on top of the TV so we could switch between the New York antenna on the roof and the one in the attic which had always been there pointed at the local Philadelphia stations.
There were some good nights with tropo enhancement where the New York stations came in clear as a bell and we happened to have neighbors over and I would be so excited to show them.
It was disappointing to see their reaction and say things like "Why don't you just watch the same shows on the local channels?" :-\
They didn't get it.
Now that I'm a lot older, the reaction is pretty much the same although I've managed to get a couple people I know interested in some of my video catches I've put on facebook.
But when I've brought up the subject of DXIng in other message forums that are about general interest or discussion, I always get the typical reaction of "Why don't you just listen to those stations on the internet?"
Until I found this place a few years back, I still felt like I was all alone with my interest.
That's one of the positive things about the internet.
The reason I discovered DXing to begin with was through my older brother. My father was an electronic engineer for radio design at RCA Camden and that's how my brother first became interested.
I still remember my father's workbench down in the basement where he had all kinds of things like a bunch of transistors, resistors, capacitors, and of course the old tubes.
I especially remember when my father put a big TV antenna on our roof for me so I could see the New York stations from 80 miles away in south Jersey. The wire went into my room at first but I only had a black and white TV so he ran the 300 ohm wire down into the den where our color TV was and put a device on top of the TV so we could switch between the New York antenna on the roof and the one in the attic which had always been there pointed at the local Philadelphia stations.
There were some good nights with tropo enhancement where the New York stations came in clear as a bell and we happened to have neighbors over and I would be so excited to show them.
It was disappointing to see their reaction and say things like "Why don't you just watch the same shows on the local channels?" :-\
They didn't get it.
Now that I'm a lot older, the reaction is pretty much the same although I've managed to get a couple people I know interested in some of my video catches I've put on facebook.
But when I've brought up the subject of DXIng in other message forums that are about general interest or discussion, I always get the typical reaction of "Why don't you just listen to those stations on the internet?"
Until I found this place a few years back, I still felt like I was all alone with my interest.
That's one of the positive things about the internet.
The reason I discovered DXing to begin with was through my older brother. My father was an electronic engineer for radio design at RCA Camden and that's how my brother first became interested.
I still remember my father's workbench down in the basement where he had all kinds of things like a bunch of transistors, resistors, capacitors, and of course the old tubes.
The Dude said:
This comes under the eternal "my generation" subject line.
Some of us move on, others prefer the comfortable, the familiar. It's a matter of choice.
I went through an SX 99, an HQ-180, a 51-J4, R390, R4, R4 B and some others. I sold my last DX quality receivers several years ago. Surfing the web for oldies stations from Italy (Il Camalioti, anyone?) or pasillos from Ecuador is far superior to trying to enjoy something while the 1 kHz mechanical filter is engaged and the station 5 kHz away is slopping over it badly. I found something new and better.
I also read on a kindle, send eMails and listen to music on my smartphone. I used to buy paperbacks, put stamps on letters and collect 45's. New is definitely better. And I used to listen to Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and British Invasion and Motown acts. Now I like Pitbull and Blake Sheldon and Juan Magán. They are better, too.
Gee, I remember when I put a particular continent's first Top 40 station on the air, other broadcasters said that it wouldn't work, that it had not tradition and would not last compared with the old way.
Try change. It is a heck of a lot more fun.
purpledevil said:
As did mine. But, from DXing I got an interest in hanging around radio stations. And that became a career, and silenced the complaints.
boiseengineer said:
LOL. I went through the same thing with my mother. You should have seen her the day I evaluated a UHF converter I had bought by installing in on the color TV set that already had UHF reception. "You'll get UHF twice, you're going to set the TV on fire!"
Nice to hear from another TV DXer out there
As any TV DXer would do, I did my share of changing channels. My father called this "twisting its tail", and he was sure that I would break it or otherwise damage it. Only later would we find that it was NOT twisting its tail that eventually would gum up the switches in the tuner. I broke a few dial cords over the years, which I quickly learned to fix, although it was often frustrating, especially if there was no diagram available. I wore out a few Delco tuning dials, and tuned them with the mechanical presets, even in between presets using two buttons.
gar fla said:
I remember doing much the same thing when I was 10 or 11. An uncle lived about five miles outside St. Marys, Ohio, and in those days (the late 1980s/1990), rural cable was a thing of the future. He had one of those giant antennas that pulled in stations from 60 miles out with no problem.
One evening I was visiting up there and got the chance to flip around and see what else would come on. Amazingly (to me), I was seeing Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo stations from 100 miles away through some snow but still with enough of a signal to see and hear. My aunt, who was in the adjacent kitchen, said something to the effect, "Why don't you get a station you can see?"
I basically said I was just searching around to see what came in on the weaker channels. She wasn't watching anything at the time and had no issue with it.
The other nice thing about that setup was my aunt and uncle got more network affiliates than the local cable offered, so my grandparents occasionally would go out there to watch games (mostly involving Chicago teams on the Fort Wayne affiliates their cable didn't air).
I think they could get all major affiliates from both Dayton and Fort Wayne, as well as NBC from Lima (which at channel 35 was so strong it bled onto the Fort Wayne NBC at 33 at times). Lima had only an NBC affiliate in those days, whereas now it has all four. It's made me wonder how tall a digital antenna would have to be today to pick up what that analog antenna could 20 years ago.
They haven't had that antenna in years, however. They long ago (late 1990s maybe?) switched to a service called Watch TV based out of Lima.
Though I knew only three female DXers (and dated two), I think that females are in the distinct, if not extinct, minority and always will be vis-a-vis DX of any sort. Talk about an endangered species.
Yet, one would think that gals would appreciate this civilized form of male hunting rather than rebuke it. There's no blood, no guns, no live snake collection, no 8-foot ball of aluminum in the den, no entrails, no violence. And twirling a four-foot loop antenna or getting up to rotate the antenna is more exercise than punching some wee button on something the size of a candy bar and slumping back into the settee cushions to watch ESPN sports highlights.
But no, our tastes are not appreciated by the majority. And well, women are in the majority.
After a while, the finished basement in our house had become my DX den. It would get sloppy from time to time. Reels of tape dangled. Tubes would be next to Snickers wrappers. There were wires and coils and transmitters the size of a charcoal briquet and soda bottles and radios with no cabinets and unfinished circuit boards and maps and clocks and more wires ........
'Would you PLEASE clean up that place?' my Mom would ask. 'It's full of DX!'
We Sixties kids were and are so misunderstood
May it always be so. We DXers from that era are the first generation to refuse acceptance of solely local AM radio, after all. For some civilized-predator reason we sought the vistas and the imagery (and the occasional song) of exotic Buffalo, Norfolk, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Little Rock, picturesque Detroit, Chicago and other promised lands beyond the horizon.
The 2013 kids have, and rightfully devour, the modern devices. After all, this is when they came of age, through no fault or credit of their own.
Showing my considerable age, though, the opnion here is that we retirees with the transistors on the shelves as though they were Purple Hearts got to experience perhaps the last era during which there were still many things left to our imaginations.
When I get planted, I hope someone sticks a variable capacitor into my headstone.
Maybe with the enscription 'You Only DX Once'
Yet, one would think that gals would appreciate this civilized form of male hunting rather than rebuke it. There's no blood, no guns, no live snake collection, no 8-foot ball of aluminum in the den, no entrails, no violence. And twirling a four-foot loop antenna or getting up to rotate the antenna is more exercise than punching some wee button on something the size of a candy bar and slumping back into the settee cushions to watch ESPN sports highlights.
But no, our tastes are not appreciated by the majority. And well, women are in the majority.
After a while, the finished basement in our house had become my DX den. It would get sloppy from time to time. Reels of tape dangled. Tubes would be next to Snickers wrappers. There were wires and coils and transmitters the size of a charcoal briquet and soda bottles and radios with no cabinets and unfinished circuit boards and maps and clocks and more wires ........
'Would you PLEASE clean up that place?' my Mom would ask. 'It's full of DX!'
We Sixties kids were and are so misunderstood
May it always be so. We DXers from that era are the first generation to refuse acceptance of solely local AM radio, after all. For some civilized-predator reason we sought the vistas and the imagery (and the occasional song) of exotic Buffalo, Norfolk, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Little Rock, picturesque Detroit, Chicago and other promised lands beyond the horizon.
The 2013 kids have, and rightfully devour, the modern devices. After all, this is when they came of age, through no fault or credit of their own.
Showing my considerable age, though, the opnion here is that we retirees with the transistors on the shelves as though they were Purple Hearts got to experience perhaps the last era during which there were still many things left to our imaginations.
When I get planted, I hope someone sticks a variable capacitor into my headstone.
Maybe with the enscription 'You Only DX Once'
DXing has always been an odd-man-out hobby, probably since the 1960's. It's always been sort of pointless to try to explain to anyone why it's enjoyable to listen to music and talk phasing in and out, along with a bit of static. I didn't bother telling people about it in the 1980's, when I first built a spiral loop, and tuned in Mexico on my boombox. I knew then that no one would 'get' it, so what's the point of trying to explain it?
It's like trying to explain why vinyl records are enjoyable to some people. Or using a telescope for astronomy when you can see galaxies a lot better by finding Hubble photos on the internet. Or why some people are into riding horses when you can get somewhere a lot faster in a car. Or that renaissance fair stuff. It may look goofy and pointless to some, but there are people who are really into that, they really get enthused about it.
I have never cared what other people think about my hobby -- it's really not their business to decide for me what I like or what I don't like to do with my spare time. And I couldn't care less about what younger people think, for the same reason. Most people don't even know I MWDX or listen to shortwave.
As far as the future of MW DXing -- the Medium waves are basically useless for anything except broadcasting of some sort. I think even if it goes digital, medium waves still propagate. So MW DXing will always be around in some form, even if it doesn't sound as cool.
It's like trying to explain why vinyl records are enjoyable to some people. Or using a telescope for astronomy when you can see galaxies a lot better by finding Hubble photos on the internet. Or why some people are into riding horses when you can get somewhere a lot faster in a car. Or that renaissance fair stuff. It may look goofy and pointless to some, but there are people who are really into that, they really get enthused about it.
I have never cared what other people think about my hobby -- it's really not their business to decide for me what I like or what I don't like to do with my spare time. And I couldn't care less about what younger people think, for the same reason. Most people don't even know I MWDX or listen to shortwave.
As far as the future of MW DXing -- the Medium waves are basically useless for anything except broadcasting of some sort. I think even if it goes digital, medium waves still propagate. So MW DXing will always be around in some form, even if it doesn't sound as cool.
Interesting to see so may people have written with their stories about being criticized for listening to DX signals affected by fading or noise. It gets even worse when people see me listening to a poor AM signal to listen to the music rather than just to ID the station, but, sadly, that is what radio has come to.
When I was young, CKLW-FM was still simulcasting AM 800, WEXL was (and still is) a graveyarder, and WDEE had a severly directional 12-tower pattern - at night, at my home on Detroit's far east side, they took a wallop from WLAC's adjacent-channel splatter when they could be heard under the co-channel interference from WTOP. The result was that the best country-formatted signal in my neighborhood at night was WSM!
Nowadays, if I want to heard adult standards, I have to deal with CFZM at night (which only has music in irregular parts of their schedule) and WLEC by day (a graveyarder at 50 miles that gets pounded by WHLS - itself a decent oldies station - if I go too far north), even WLEC often cuts the music for Indians games.
Add to this that the last AC station in the Detroit area just flipped to sports talk
When I was young, CKLW-FM was still simulcasting AM 800, WEXL was (and still is) a graveyarder, and WDEE had a severly directional 12-tower pattern - at night, at my home on Detroit's far east side, they took a wallop from WLAC's adjacent-channel splatter when they could be heard under the co-channel interference from WTOP. The result was that the best country-formatted signal in my neighborhood at night was WSM!
Nowadays, if I want to heard adult standards, I have to deal with CFZM at night (which only has music in irregular parts of their schedule) and WLEC by day (a graveyarder at 50 miles that gets pounded by WHLS - itself a decent oldies station - if I go too far north), even WLEC often cuts the music for Indians games.
Add to this that the last AC station in the Detroit area just flipped to sports talk
I have enjoyed all the stories, and mine is about the same.
My parents were very accepting, to the point that everyone knew years before I was in high school that I would be
going to Valparaiso Technical Institute upon graduation to feed my radio and dx bug.
Far from finding the noises and effects MW AM bothersome, to me it's like finding the reassuring watermark in the paper
of a document, letting you know it's the real thing.
Of course I can find music and content anywhere.
The internet is just glorified landline technology.
No matter how much data can be moved on short-hop cellular wireless, I see the service dropouts and failures
associated with the use of such short waves as such an annoying problem that I prefer the rock solid
behavior of MW AM.
Even the FM where I llive is sputtery due to continuous airplane takeoff/landing traffic on three parallel runways.
My family would never ask why I am listening to static. They'll listen too, for quite a while because they know I'm listening critically
to something. When I was a boy I loved to find road maps, which often had charts of many stations within the state.
My parents were very accepting, to the point that everyone knew years before I was in high school that I would be
going to Valparaiso Technical Institute upon graduation to feed my radio and dx bug.
Far from finding the noises and effects MW AM bothersome, to me it's like finding the reassuring watermark in the paper
of a document, letting you know it's the real thing.
Of course I can find music and content anywhere.
The internet is just glorified landline technology.
No matter how much data can be moved on short-hop cellular wireless, I see the service dropouts and failures
associated with the use of such short waves as such an annoying problem that I prefer the rock solid
behavior of MW AM.
Even the FM where I llive is sputtery due to continuous airplane takeoff/landing traffic on three parallel runways.
My family would never ask why I am listening to static. They'll listen too, for quite a while because they know I'm listening critically
to something. When I was a boy I loved to find road maps, which often had charts of many stations within the state.
The previous story from the Detroit area jogged another memory from a couple years back. DX was what got me into radio and kept me interested, and on 9/11/11 I was driving back to Columbus with a bunch of buddies from a bachelor party in Windsor. Good thing was the car had satellite radio so we could keep up to date on NFL games beyond those we could hear OTA. The driver would switch to a game, wait and wonder what it was, and usually once I heard the play-by-play guy I nailed the team. After four or five teams (not including the Bears, whom no one was surprised I recognized), he asked "how do you know all this?"
All I had to say was "hey, I'm with radio like a lot of people are with TV."
All I had to say was "hey, I'm with radio like a lot of people are with TV."
Two more anecdotes about strangers to DXing, heartening this time, for PurpleDevil's collection.
In 1994 my Folks drove to visit and see how their son was doing with the new fixer-upper house I'd bought for $5900.
One of the nights they stayed over was the final game of the 1994 Stanley Cup. My Dad was a staunch Rangers fan, and the standard-issue long-despairing one ; they hadn't won a Stanley Cup since the days when there were only like four pro hockey teams.
(Aside from my DXing and a career as a jock on the radio, Dad also disapproved of my playing hockey! I mean, he could root for his Bathgates and Ratelles and Gilberts, but he didn't want his son trying that for a living ..... but that's another issue)
Well, since I didn't have cable hooked up yet in the gutted house, we wound up listening -- and with Dad enjoying -- game 7 on the radio, off WFAN, maybe 150 miles to our east. The Curse was broken when the Rangers won. Dad was listening to all of this, his ears questing during fades, off a portable radio. It was great, seeing the gleam in his eyes at this vindication -- perhaps even a grudging, silent salute to this method of hobby and lifestyle his son had chosen.
Some twenty years later, a Phillies fan buddy was given a choice by his wife : Either watch their World Series game on this nice new wide screen you bought -- or drink beer and curse. But not both, in front of the kids, in this house. Not with you in this state of mind with the veins on your neck standing out.
The decision must have been a staggering and heroic one for him to make. Baseball and beer go together inseparably, especially at World Series time when *your* team is playing in it.
This staunch Phillies fan, maybe late 30's (Utley jersey and all) correctly opted for the 'beer' choice, and knocked on my door, carrying a 232-pack of Miller Genuine Draft. He knew I was a DXer and had a good radio. So he spent the game session here, listening to one full game off WPHT 1210.
Do you know, halfway through it all, he was tilting the radio for azimuth and best signal reception and static minimizing he could execute, just like a seasoned pro DXer would have done. For example, both of us heard the sonics of a well-tagged ball and said 'THAT'S hit!' simultaneously.
Both sports/demo-leaping/DXing moments were accomplished via the same radio, by the way -- the GE Superadio II, barefoot.
I think there's still hope as long as there are still radios.
In 1994 my Folks drove to visit and see how their son was doing with the new fixer-upper house I'd bought for $5900.
One of the nights they stayed over was the final game of the 1994 Stanley Cup. My Dad was a staunch Rangers fan, and the standard-issue long-despairing one ; they hadn't won a Stanley Cup since the days when there were only like four pro hockey teams.
(Aside from my DXing and a career as a jock on the radio, Dad also disapproved of my playing hockey! I mean, he could root for his Bathgates and Ratelles and Gilberts, but he didn't want his son trying that for a living ..... but that's another issue)
Well, since I didn't have cable hooked up yet in the gutted house, we wound up listening -- and with Dad enjoying -- game 7 on the radio, off WFAN, maybe 150 miles to our east. The Curse was broken when the Rangers won. Dad was listening to all of this, his ears questing during fades, off a portable radio. It was great, seeing the gleam in his eyes at this vindication -- perhaps even a grudging, silent salute to this method of hobby and lifestyle his son had chosen.
Some twenty years later, a Phillies fan buddy was given a choice by his wife : Either watch their World Series game on this nice new wide screen you bought -- or drink beer and curse. But not both, in front of the kids, in this house. Not with you in this state of mind with the veins on your neck standing out.
The decision must have been a staggering and heroic one for him to make. Baseball and beer go together inseparably, especially at World Series time when *your* team is playing in it.
This staunch Phillies fan, maybe late 30's (Utley jersey and all) correctly opted for the 'beer' choice, and knocked on my door, carrying a 232-pack of Miller Genuine Draft. He knew I was a DXer and had a good radio. So he spent the game session here, listening to one full game off WPHT 1210.
Do you know, halfway through it all, he was tilting the radio for azimuth and best signal reception and static minimizing he could execute, just like a seasoned pro DXer would have done. For example, both of us heard the sonics of a well-tagged ball and said 'THAT'S hit!' simultaneously.
Both sports/demo-leaping/DXing moments were accomplished via the same radio, by the way -- the GE Superadio II, barefoot.
I think there's still hope as long as there are still radios.
Rand McNally used to have an Atlas with a Radio Guide. It listed all the stations at first, and later the more powerful and/or fulltime stations in larger cities. 1956 is the latest edition I've seen. It listed call letters, day power, frequency, and network. They did then have the maps, and the panel had the most powerful stations in a city, but with no powers listed, and in a region of the states with few stations, those with less power. Rarely were any stations listed with less than 1000 watts, day and night, except in some smaller cities where Class IVs were listed because they were fulltime. By the time I found the Atlas, many stations had recently increased day power to 5000 watts.
My stepdad used to get annoyed at me whenever I would be riding around with him and I would flip through the FM dial just to see what was coming in and if I stopped on a frequency with a scratchy station or has multiple stations coming in at once, he would be like 'Why don't you pick a station that actually comes in?' I explained to him what I was doing but he said it was irritating to listen to a station that had static, bleedover, or other interference. He doesn't seem to mind it as much now but if I leave it on a weak station, he will eventually change it lol. When it comes to AM radio he always is like 'Why is it that I can a New York station can come in clear at night but yet I can't get 1450 from Sandusky, less than 20 miles away?" so I tried explaining the difference between 'graveyard frequencies' and clear frequencies and why WLEC is hard to listen to at night but clear during the day. I have had people tell me the whole "Well you can probably listen to that station online if you wanted to hear it" blah blah blah lol
My brother the same way, He knows I listen on my Walkman,
You could get the same stations on a phone...Well it's not the same as listening to it online
You could get the same stations on a phone...Well it's not the same as listening to it online
There are 2 things which annoy me about DX,
1. The fading on am. It's seriously annoying when you hear a station, then it fades out just before the ID. I prefer a steady signal, even if it is weak.
2. This happens to me a lot on fm, especially with the radio I used to have in my room. I would turn it on to get up in the morning and reception would be clear, since the sticks are about 20 miles from me. I take my hand away from the radio and reception goes to a semi-listenable static-filled signal. The other one that happened to me this morning is that KPLZ was clear last night when I turned my radio off. This morning, with the dial not moving at all, the station was full of static and making a buzzing noise.
1. The fading on am. It's seriously annoying when you hear a station, then it fades out just before the ID. I prefer a steady signal, even if it is weak.
2. This happens to me a lot on fm, especially with the radio I used to have in my room. I would turn it on to get up in the morning and reception would be clear, since the sticks are about 20 miles from me. I take my hand away from the radio and reception goes to a semi-listenable static-filled signal. The other one that happened to me this morning is that KPLZ was clear last night when I turned my radio off. This morning, with the dial not moving at all, the station was full of static and making a buzzing noise.
bobdavcav said:
The ionosphere is what it is. It's been that way since it was first discovered to be beneficial for radio transmissions (pre-satellite), and will always be that way now that it's considered a liability for most RF spectrum users, outside of hams, the few remaining shortwave broadcasters, and aircraft/maritime/military backup systems. Want steady signals? Stick with UHF and above.
Sounds like your locals are overloading your radio. A better-quality FM tuner will help. But there is fading on FM as well - tropospheric ducting and E-skip are both fade-friendly propagation modes.
Talking about fading in and out and tropo
In Vallejo, Where my brother lives I get both 92.7 KREV, 92.5 KFBK
But when I go out walking with his dog, I hear KREV fading in then fading out, Comes in Steady then weak..I don't think it like a tropo cuz KREV is so close
In Vallejo, Where my brother lives I get both 92.7 KREV, 92.5 KFBK
But when I go out walking with his dog, I hear KREV fading in then fading out, Comes in Steady then weak..I don't think it like a tropo cuz KREV is so close
- Status