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December 23, 2019 11:12 am  #1


DX Opening

I got a phone call from a friend in Waterloo who recently purchased a new smart tv with an indoor antenna which he attached to a window. His normal reception is Global, CKCO, CITY, CHCH and TVO. Last night, he had WBCB and WFMJ  from Youngstown, WEWS Cleveland, KDKA Pittsburgh and WHIZ Zanesville, Ohio, which is about 52 miles from Columbus. Receiving those stations in the analog days under tropo conditions would not have surprised me. In todays digital world, those distances surprised me. Of course, my friend was disappointed when the signals were gone this morning. Anyone happen to stumble across this opening last night?

 

December 23, 2019 6:22 pm  #2


Re: DX Opening

I haven't paid much attention - this isn't a huge time of the year from FM (or TV) DX. But a Grimsby ON DXer did on 12/23 have the following in the morning:  101.9 WVAQ Morgantown WV at 248 miles and 94.3 WBXQ Patton, PA at 180 miles. Nothing too exciting. Given the warm-up I could have been keeping an eye on various DX maps and reporting sites that can help me decide whether it's worth my time to go mobile from downtown Toronto. When I lived in St. George, north of Brantford, on fairly high ground, it was almost daily routine to get Cleveland, Youngstown, Erie and even into Pittsburgh and Columbus. But that was way back when the FM and TV bands were considerably less crowded.

 

December 25, 2019 1:06 am  #3


Re: DX Opening

The aforementioned Grimsby ON DXer had some decent DX Dec 23:

162.450 Mhz Odell Illinois and 162.425 Lockport Illinois (weather radio band is just above FM and a good indicator of FM conditions). He also reported WBKI TV 16 in Salem Indiana. These are all over 450 miles.

 

December 25, 2019 10:48 am  #4


Re: DX Opening

I used to love to DXing TV. But that was before everything switched to digital. Not only do the signals not propagate like they used to (I remember getting Florida and Denver on a few warm summer days) but it’s harder now to know when it’s happening.
 
The main reason for me is the way many TVs and DVRs are these days. I have an OTA DVR+ that I like very much. But you can’t tune in any channel at random unless it’s been previously scanned. And that only works if the station is coming in at that moment.
 
So if I try to tune into, say, WHAM-TV in Rochester, my DVR skips from Channel 11 to Channel 17 – and I can’t manually get it to go to 13 at all. This is a real Catch-22 for DXers: You can’t tune it in to know if it’s there unless you scan for it first. But you’re unlikely to scan for it unless you know it's coming in in the first place.
 
I used to have a machine that automatically scanned for new channels and many is the morning I’d come downstairs, turn it on and see a message saying, “We found 3 new channels” which would be listed by number and call letters. It would sometimes happen overnight, but they were registered as a catch even if they were no longer coming in at that moment - and the machine's memory stored them until the next time. 
 
There are a lot of good things about HDTV. This new scanning method for receiving channels, unfortunately, isn’t one of them.

 

December 25, 2019 11:46 am  #5


Re: DX Opening

I did some DTV DX but have largely abandoned TV. Not as interesting as watching an analog video signal fade in. It was almost always marginal increases; with digital it's pretty much solid or nothing and in between you're watching a bar move to the right. Sleep inducing...

 

December 30, 2019 11:21 am  #6


Re: DX Opening

It's not often Dxing gets noticed in the press, but an unusual event sparked this article in a British newspaper. 

Freeview television goes down across Britain because of 'unusual weather'