DX – The Easy Way: How to Chase, Work & Confirm DX – The Easy Way

Book Preface

I found myself getting more and more excited while gathering my outline for this book. I was even more passionate about DX than I imagined and hope to convey that ardor to you.

This book is written for the HF DX chaser. It is not advice to DXpeditioners. No particular manufacturer or product is endorsed. On occasion, a product might be mentioned to describe its functionality. Read the reviews on eHam.net, QST magazine and other sources online and in print for comparisons.

If you see something more than once, it is because it fit the narrative in more than one place. Consider the repetition as reinforcement. There are a few opinions on these pages and there may be differences of opinion or some qualifier or another I missed. This leads me to point out a truism I discovered a long time ago, “If you ask 5 hams a question, you will get 7 different opinions and maybe a fist fight.”
Please send your comments, corrections and chastisements to me at [email protected]. This book is printed on demand and corrections can be incorporated within 24 hours.

Begin at the beginning. I grew up in the days before personal computers, the internet, video games and 500 channels of color TV. We made our entertainment. I remember building an airplane cockpit using shoe boxes with toothpicks for control levers. We shot marbles and built elaborate obstacle courses that would make a golf course designer proud. If ants got in the way, we dumped lighter fluid down their hole and lit it. No mercy. That was third grade.

These were the days when you rode a bike without a helmet, cars didn’t have seatbelts and you stayed out until the street lights came on. We played in the woods, caught snakes and lit cherry bombs. Model boats and planes filled my shelves. In fifth-grade science class, we built a crystal radio set. It only tuned one station. At night, I would tuck the earpiece under my pillow and fall asleep listening to basketball games. Basketball on the radio takes a lot of imagination and held no interest for me. I was just amazed to hear radio coming from a rock and no batteries. That station was about 30 miles away.

Tuning the family’s Crosley 5-tube AM radio, I discovered “skip” – the bouncing of radio waves off the ionosphere. It was exciting to hear the big 50,000 watt AM clear-channel stations booming across the country. But that was nothing compared the excitement to come.

That’s how I became a fledgling DXer. I guess I have to credit my parents for kicking it up a notch. When I got older, dad told me they tried to stimulate creativity when selecting our Christmas presents. I remember model airplanes and ships. One year it was a chemistry set then an Erector set. I think I was in 7th grade the year a Heathkit shortwave receiver appeared under the tree. I was already a builder so I looked forward to the assembling and soldering, but nothing prepared me for what I was going to hear come through that speaker.

Miraculously, the radio worked. There was something eerie about hearing Radio Havana Cuba or Radio Moscow during the Cold War. I kept expecting the FBI to break down the door. I got my first lesson in political “spin” hearing Cold War propaganda even before the term spin was invented. I remember thinking it was funny that the tune used to identify Radio Havana was the same one the Gillette Razor Company used in their commercials. I guess since Castro has a beard, he doesn’t know about Gillette razors.