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Tropo Off To a Good Start

CW Birmingham

The 2016 tropo season is starting here in Florida. I began regular monitoring when I got back from the trip a couple weeks ago and was rewarded Tuesday night with very early appearances from Mobile's WEAR 17, WMPV 20, and WKRG 27. (Mobile is the New Norfolk. ) This was a widespread opening that effected the midwest, south, and Gulf. I'd hoped to see something farther inland than Mobile and caught WTTO 28 from Birmingham! It's my first catch from that market (I haven't even seen Montgomery yet), farthest north DTV, and second-farthest DTV overall! And WTTO makes my 88th DTV catch, a number that belongs in 2015 (having had Back To The Future Day and all). Lord willing, 2016 will be my last tropo season in this apartment and 2017's will have much better accomodations for antennas.

95 percent of my TV DX clips were originally recorded on this JVC VCR.

Sadly, the JVC VCR that's been my main DX recorder almost as long as I've been recording DX has retired... after I recorded WTTO something broke and it started eating tapes. VHS is well past its heyday and even for DX I've been capturing directly to the laptop more and more (to get better resolution for my YouTube compilations). Eightteen years is pretty good for a VCR. For now I'll have to keep the laptop booted and ready to make on-the-fly recordings, which was my last regular use of VHS. Now the analog format is gone like the analog stations it once recorded (Cuba's notwithstanding). Hopefully for 2017's season I can have a whole new recording setup, with digital 1s and 0s every step of the way.

 

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