dx

After my recent excursion to the Dayton Hamvention® in Xenia, Ohio, I began to have some thoughts and observations about DX, DXing, and DXpeditions; and how they have evolved over the years. This brought more considerations for the future of DXing to my mind.

I got my license in 1965 at the age of barely 14 years old. I was immediately hooked on amateur radio. For those of us in this age bracket, you understand why it was so addicting back then. For most of us from that era, we were “self-motivated” to get our ham licenses. The mere thought of being able to communicate with other people all around the globe was enough to “set the hook.” Amateur radio was our version of the internet back then. How else could you chat with someone in a completely different part of the country, or the world, right from your basement or bedroom? Remember, back then even telephone calls outside your local area were charged “by the minute.” You actually had to get up out of your chair to change the channel on your TV! If there was any “ducting” on the VHF frequencies, you might not even be able to see anything intelligible on TV at all due to multichannel interference from other stations on the same channel in other cities, especially if you were not very local to the desired TV broadcast transmitter. Everybody had to have.) The TV signals were actually rebroadcast inside a coax cable feed and distributed by using “in line” amplifiers (repeaters). I won’t go too much into the interference issues this caused for amateur radio and CB operators in the early days of cable TV other than to say that if there were ANY “leaks” in the cable system, RF could get in, or get out at times, causing havoc either way.