TV and FM DX - Wikipedia
TV and FM DX - Wikipedia - Lemmy.world
On the Internet Archive, I was looking around for mentions of an independent television station from back in the day, and stumbled upon a newsletter for a group involved with television “DX”. I’d never heard of DX. Getting signals from far away because the atmosphere was being suitably weird in one of a few possible ways. On one hand, that’s sort of cool and I wish I’d known about that when I was a kid so maybe I could have paid the right kind of attention to times when signals were weird, or when something was coming in that usually wasn’t. Those guys in that newsletter were mostly listing reports of their good finds over the past N months — and they kept printing these for decades, and must have moved to the web since. And some broadcasts were from so far away from where they lived that I’m sure that would have seemed cool to me to see. On the other hand, it was very write-only because, even if you do live in the town that other guy lives in, what can you do with the fact that he pulled in some unusual reception a few months ago one evening? They would generally go many days without finding anything, even with persistence and the right kind of prepared eye. I hope it was Dad with his own television(s) and not the family television and “Jeez, Dad, quit it. Come on.” Oh but then again, you could cycle through a lot of channels in 3 minutes worth of commercials, couldn’t you? Well, being in a club and being not the only one with an uncommon interest is heartening. The Wikipedia article says DX is a telegraphy term for long-distance. It brings to mind how I’ve seen WX for weather, and maybe there’s a whole series of X abbreviations from the telegraph days?
