On the right summer morning, I can sit in my recliner in western Iowa and watch the weather forecast from a television station in Texas, plain as day, on Channel 3. Twenty minutes later it might be a station in Louisiana, and then one in Florida, and then nothing but snow again, as if somebody shut a door. That's DX-TV. I have been at it since 1977, from the same house, under the same tower, and I haven't gotten tired of it yet.

My name is Linwood Vroman. I'm fifty-five and retired from the telephone company, where I spent thirty-one years as a switchman in the central office, keeping the switches running that connected your calls. I started on the old electromechanical switches that clicked and clattered all day and finished on the electronic ones that just sit there and hum. A man who likes to know how signals get from one place to another is a man who ends up with a fifty-foot tower in his back yard. My wife Barbara says she knew that when she married me. She didn't know about the tower.

What DXing Is

"DX" is old radio shorthand for distance. DXing is trying to receive stations from farther away than you're supposed to. Ham radio operators do it, shortwave listeners do it, AM and FM radio listeners do it, and a few of us do it with television.

Ordinarily a TV station reaches maybe sixty or seventy miles, a little more with a good antenna, because TV signals travel in a straight line and the earth curves away underneath them. Past that, you get snow. But a few times a year, and many times every summer, the air and the sky do something unusual, and signals that should have run out of steam over Nebraska come down in my yard instead. The two big ones:

There are a few other ways, like the meteor bursts that give you a second or two of somebody's picture and then nothing, but skip and tropo are the bread and butter.

Identifying what you've got is the real game. A DXer doesn't count a station unless he can say where it came from. I log a station by whatever I can see or hear: the station's logo in the corner, the local news, a city named in a commercial for a furniture store or a car dealer, the station identification they run near the top of each hour, and best of all, the weather map. A weather map tells you the state, and usually the part of the state, in about five seconds. I have identified more stations by their weather maps than by everything else put together. (Retired weathercaster Hal Winters keeps a notebook here on the same street, Weather on Channel 6, about thirty years of doing the TV weather in a small market, magnets and all. I enjoyed it, as somebody who has watched a great many weathermen from a great many places.)

I don't put stations' call letters on this page. My log just says what I saw: "Channel 4, Florida, news logo." That's enough for me.

My Setup

A friend from work and I put the tower up the summer of 1977, on a concrete base we poured ourselves, and it has been through twenty-two Iowa winters and a few things I'd rather not call storms in front of Barbara. I climb it every fall to check the bolts and the antennas, and every fall she stands at the bottom with her arms folded.

The rotor is a motor at the top of the mast that turns the antennas. The control box sits on top of the TV, and when skip comes in from the south, I turn the antennas south. Antennas that point are the whole secret. A big antenna pointed the wrong way is not much better than rabbit ears.

The old 19-inch set is my favorite for skip. It has a dial tuner and fine tuning, and it'll show you a picture in the snow that the newer sets won't. The newer one has a blue screen that comes on when the signal is weak, which is fine for watching the ballgame and useless for DX, so I found the setting in the menu and turned it off.

The VCR is the most important thing I own after the tower. Skip comes and goes so fast that by the time you've found your glasses, the logo is gone. So when the picture starts rolling in, I hit record first and ask questions later. Then I play it back slow, frame by frame if I have to, and read the logo or the weather map at my leisure.

A Great Morning in June

Tuesday, June 15, 1999. I want to tell you about this one, because it was the best skip morning I've had in four or five summers.

Every summer morning I check the low channels with my coffee. Usually Channel 2 is snow, Channel 3 is snow, and so on, and I go out and mow. On the 15th, at about ten after nine, Channel 3 had a shadow in the snow. A picture trying to come through. Then it rolled, and steadied, and all of a sudden there was a weatherman standing in front of a map of the Texas Panhandle, clear as if he were down the road, telling me it would be ninety-eight tomorrow. I hit record. I yelled for Barbara. Barbara said she'd seen Texas before.

For the next two and a half hours the band was wide open. The skip came from the south first, Texas and Oklahoma, and then it slid east as the morning went on, the way it sometimes does: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and then, a little before eleven, Florida, which from here is about twelve hundred miles. A Florida station on Channel 3 was talking about the hurricane season that had just started. Two stations fought it out on Channel 2 for most of an hour, rolling over each other with those lines through the picture we call venetian blinds, and I got a weather map from one and a news logo from the other.

By the end I had logged ten stations in seven states. Then at about noon, in the middle of a commercial for a car dealer in Georgia, it faded and was gone. Snow on every channel, as if none of it had happened. Except I had it on tape, and in the notebook. All ten are in the log.

That's what keeps me at it. Most mornings there's nothing. Then one morning in June, Texas walks into your living room.

How to Start with a Set-Top Antenna

You don't need a tower. My first skip ever came in on rabbit ears, in June of 1977, a month before the tower went up. Here is how to try it next summer with what's on top of your set right now:

1. Use rabbit ears, not cable. Unhook the cable and hook up a plain set-top antenna. Pull the rods all the way out for the low channels.
2. Find the empty channels. Write down which of Channels 2 through 6 are snow where you live. Those are your windows.
3. Check them in season. From late May through July, look in the middle of the morning and again around suppertime. When you see a shadow or a rolling picture where there's usually snow, that's skip.
4. Turn off the blue screen if your set has one, and turn off any automatic tuning that skips the empty channels.
5. Record it. Keep a tape in the VCR. Hit record the minute something shows up.
6. Write it down. Date, time, channel, what you saw. If you can't tell where it's from yet, write down everything you can see and figure it out later.
7. Try your FM radio, too. The sound for Channel 6 sits just below the bottom of the FM dial, and on some radios you can hear it at the very bottom, around 87.7. When Channel 6 skip comes in, sometimes you'll hear it before you see it.
8. Watch the weather for tropo. On a calm, muggy, still night, especially with a big high overhead, try the UHF channels late at night or right around sunrise.

If you get bitten, and you will, then it's an outdoor antenna, then a rotor, then a bigger antenna, and then you're having a conversation with your wife about a tower. I can't help you with that one.

What About Digital?

The first digital television stations went on the air in a few of the big cities last November, and more are coming every year. The government's plan is for the old analog stations to be turned off eventually, in about seven years if things go the way Washington says, once enough people have digital sets. Right now a digital set costs about what a good used car does, so I'm not holding my breath.

What will it mean for DX? I don't know, and I don't think anybody does yet. Here's what worries me. From what I've read, a digital picture comes in perfect or not at all. That's wonderful for a family watching the news and hard on a DXer, because half of what we log now is a faint, snowy, rolling picture that you squint at long enough to read a logo. With digital, there won't be anything to squint at. You'll have it or you won't.

On the other hand, I've also read that the digital signal carries the station's name right in it, so a set might just tell you who you've got. If that's true, it would be the easiest identification I ever made. I'll believe it when I see it on my own screen. Most of the new digital stations are on UHF channels, so I expect tropo will be the way to catch them, and I've got a few years to think about a new antenna.

Either way, the analog stations aren't going anywhere for a while yet, and the skip will be back next June. So will I.

>> MY LOG, SUMMER 1999 <<