YEARLY DX LOGS 1996 THROUGH 2020
These are my own handwritten logs going as far back as 1996. If you can put up with my scribbling, there are some interesting things that can be found in them. As I was preparing these sheets to be scanned I came across one tropo log from Tennessee that I never knew I had received and I never entered it into my formal log. There are other entries with question marks next to them that could be new logs. Some things you will find in these logs are stations on frequencies that were used years ago, call letters that don't exist anymore and even stations that have changed frequencies or just plain don't exist anymore. But most importatly, you'll notice how much fun it was to DX before HD radio came on the scene. I lost around 40 frequencies available for DXing when IBOC came on the air. IBOC played a huge part in killing my enthusiasm for the hobby here. And more recently, new LPFMs and those new AM revitalization translators took care of whatever enthusiasm I had left.
Here are my raw logs:
I've been in this hobby for a long time. Recently I moved my FM log to a
mySQL database, which now allows me to analyze data that I couldn't do easily before. So what you see in the graph to your left
is the number of new station loggings I've made each year since 1998 (I could have gone back into the 1980s if I wanted to.)
What the graph shows me is that prior to HD radio, I did pretty well here. As more and more stations added HD, the amount of
new loggings dropped dramatically. I already knew that, but I didn't realize just how bad it became. But around 2013 my
new station total began to climb again, despite the fact that the IBOC sidebands are still there, and I've got LPFM
stations now plus a bazillion new FM translators to clog channels. So what am I doing different? Glad you asked.
Two things saved me. One is antenna phasing. I'm able to eliminate, or almost totally eliminate, the HD sidebands
that plague me. The last, and most important item, is Software Defined Radio, or SDR for short. I started using
SDRs for FM DXing. First was the Elad FDM-S2 followed by the RSP1 and RSP2 from SDRPlay. I've also used an Airspy
stick (I sold it and later bought it back from the person I sold it to). Currently I am using an RSPDuo for my FM DXing
which has two tuners and two antenna inputs and is perfect for antenna phasing.
The graph on the left shows how the month of May fares
for E-skip, at least here in New England. In the past it has been good but in recent years the amount
of Es I've seen here has decreased drastically and it is to the point where I don't even consider May
to be the start of skip season anymore.
The graph on the left runs from 1996 through 2019.
This page updated 06/25/20