Well it’s been a while since the last post. DX activities have been neglected in favour of the excellent World Cup and this year’s cricket test match series which has seen the beleaguered English team actually deservedly win a couple of matches.

Sporadic E wise I have easily surpassed my season’s targets (200 squares and 50 DXCC) on 6m. At the time of writing I have 214 squares and 58 DXCC. Still got some supposedly easy ones to go as well such as Z3. I’m well pleased with this year’s season and feel set-up for next year to stretch and get beyond 225 squares and 65 DXCC.

We have had one or two excellent TV DX openings and OIRT as well. Here’s a couple of videos from 3 July 2014 and the mainly Belarus OIRT logs on the same date can be seen at:

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2014-07-03&omid=2121&band=ALL&target=ALL&rxin=ALL

R1 Ukraine 1+1 TV

An oddity of Band I are the number of Italian STLs (studio to transmitter) links you can hear. On 21 July I heard Radio Delta from central Italy:

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2014-07-21&omid=2121&band=ALL&target=ALL&rxin=ALL

I had a triple whammy identification process: audio was parallel to web stream at http://www.streamsolution.it/onair/RadioDelta.asx, RDS PI Code 5362 appeared on XDR GTK display and there was a clear jingle id!

FMLIST is a simply superb resource. It does get very slow at times and I wish the operators would accept donations or adopt a membership scheme – something like £20 or €25 per annum would be excellent value to take advantage of this resource. Something akin to the QRZ.com XML subscriptions for automated lookups which are around $30 per annum.

I have not bothered too much with Band II this season. It’s a zero-sum game in London with Ofcom’s abdication of its responsibilities for keeping the band clear. In any case my priorities were 6m and some Tv DXing before the latter becomes impossible due to the digital uhf take-over.

It’s mid-August and the NA MF season has started already! We’re still getting some LA DX as well with a  good Peruvian opening on 5 August. More details on that one in the next update!