JANUARY 2024

Welcome to the first issue of the 2024 Online Digest. We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year’s day. We start off the year with an article from our publishing team about the Canton Tower in China. If you want to know more about it, just click on the picture and you’ll go right to the article.

Over on the right side of the page you will find a link to the current WTFDA membership list. In 2023 we had 36 people join the WTFDA, but we lost two (Novello and Cooper). Both members passed away. The email addresses for Wing and McAbee stopped working and we could not contact them in spite of repeated tries, so they have been removed. Our current membership total is 247.

The WTFDA’s group on Mewe.com is no more. We took it offline in December. The group has been replaced with a group (also called a server) on Discord. The easiest way to do Discord is probably to put the Discord app on your phone or desktop. Then get an invitation from Bill Hepburn to join the server. But you’re in luck because that invitation is right here.

The WTFDA Forums needed a makeover so we deleted some unused forums and moved the posts to other forums. No posts or threads there have been deleted.

Your club is in excellent financial shape with over 7k in the bank. We still keep the post office box over in Somersville but we seldom find mail in it anymore except for local political ads, notices from the Town of Somers or events at the Congregational church next door.

TV DXING. As I was surfing around the web looking for DTV related material for this issue, I began to ponder the state of TV DXing in today’s world. My feeling is that as time goes by, WTFDA will become mainly an FM DX Club. There may still be a few people out there who have the ability to DX remotely and use autologgers, but for those who don’t, they are faced with hi-band DTV stations trying their best to vacate chs 7-13 and move to UHF, and by doing so, making UHF even more clogged than it already is, and lowband VHF DTV stations clogging up channels 2-6 making whatever analog reception  is left from Central and South America impossible. For many of us, the UHF band is now dead and not dxable.

Unfortunately for many of us, DTV TV is here to stay, even if ATSC3.0 should fizzle out. FM DXing, in spite of the over 2,000 HD stations in the US and the plague of new translators and LPFMs, is still a viable alternative to TV DXing and more than a few TV DXers have made the switch and are now FM DXers.  And the WTFDA will still support both FM and TV DXing, as it always has.

WINTER ES. Perhaps if you’ve been checking the WLogger you’ve noticed a little bit of winter Es now and then. Es has been noticed on the 3rd (South Dakota to Illinois), the 4th (Texas to South Carolina and Nevada ), the 8th (WSBE-2 RI to Illinois), the 18th (Florida to Ontario paths), the 20th (mostly Missouri/Mexico paths) and the 23rd/24th with north-south Florida to Ontario paths.

BIRD SPIKES. Regarding out slightly humorous ad for Bird Spikes last month, Andy Bolin emailed this: “Are you saying you people out east don’t have woodpecker trouble? every year during mating season I have 1 or 2 woodpeckers attack my north tower. They’ll get on the boom of the 3617 CM Crossfire and try to drill it. If I turn the rotor, they’ll leave for 30 seconds or so and come back. After inspection, I’ve never found any damage but you can hear the drilling sound for three city blocks! Then there’s a woodpecker that sits near the top of the Rohn 25G tower and drills one of the legs for 2 weeks and all I do is sit in a lawn chair and say to myself…brother thats gotta hurt.”  Ed: Oh, we have woodpeckers, we do. Years ago they attacked our house. We stuck plastic owls on the roof, sprayed foul smelling woodpecker repellant on the shakes (which did not work, of course) and finally had vinyl siding installed on the house. It then took a few weeks before the peckers gave up and went elsewhere.

A REQUEST. Since this is winter and most people are bored silly because there’s no DX around, why not take that TEF6686 radio you bought yourself (or your SDR) and do a bandscan of your local stations and then compare your bandscan against what we have in our FM database. If you find discrepancies, let us know about them so we can change what we have. RDS info is much welcomed as well as format changes that we didn’t know about. Don’t forget PI codes in addition to PS/Pty and Radiotext info.

WEATHER. It seems that most of us have had a warmer than usual December. If you live away from the Great Lakes snowbelts you’ve probably haven’t seen much snow, if any. Here in CT, outside of a flake or two one day, we’ve run 7 degrees above normal for temps and December ended up the third warmest December on record. What was it like where you live?  What will January be like? Will I have to start up my snowblower? See you next month! -Mike

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FEATURED ARTICLES AND COLUMNS FOR JANUARY

TV Over the Horizon August 1952 – Thomas J Hidley

An Arkansas LPFM is Ready to Jump to Full Power – Radioworld

Tim Land’s Mega Tropo from August – Tim Land

OTA TV Making Big Changes to the Way it Transmits (Dec 23)

There are no DX columns this month.