Gratitude

Today I must express my gratitude to Steve (VE7SL), the operator of an excellent radio website. I have never met him but I did spot his antennas one day, several years ago, while walking around on Mayne Island. Yesterday Steve emailed me with a solution he had received from the author of Mestor to a problem that both of us have experienced. I tried it and it works so I can now schedule my Perseus SDR to record successfully using any of its bandwidths. This means that I will have to be less vigilant about managing the modest amount of disk space in my Windows partition.

Gratitude also goes out to my local friend Tom (VE7ZTH) for pointing me to a very handy website for identifying shortwave broadcasters. I started DXing in the era when the annual World Radio TV Handbook was the most valuable tool around for identifying the origins of HF transmissions. The hobby has come a long way. Aside from being more comprehensive and accurate than HFCC or EiBi, shortwaveschedule.com includes with every entry a link to a Google Maps image of the transmitter site. The feature is not perfect, especially for China, but it is frequently fascinating. It's quite a thrill to look at an image of an antenna array on another continent while listening to a signal that originated there at the very moment that it is coming into my radio room from one of the simple aerials attached to my fence.