Hi John,

I think you are spot-on with your comments on "luck". Most of the time, good
DXers "make their luck" based on their wealth of experience.

I've watch my friend John Bryant on many DXpeditions, pass by *common*
trans-Pacific MW signals of amazing strength during excellent propagation
conditions. Despite the allure and fun of enjoying a "near-local" quality
signal of regularly heard DX, he goes right to frequencies with interesting
jumbles of low-level audio to see what might rise above the din, or he
chases his personal "hitlist" of highly sought-after stations. John knows
not to waste his time on the common stuff during the excellent openings. In
this way, John makes his own luck. In the same way, on his Easter Island
DXpedition he didn't spend much time tuning Chinese MW stations which are
common at our Grayland DXpedition location. He went after DX that would be
more exotic for his interests, and more distant from Easter Island. He was
rewarded with catches like Radio Farda-UAE and BBC-Oman on medium wave.

You asked about the PC requirements of Perseus. I have not seen anything
published specifically listing the minimum requirements, but I've upgraded
to a laptop with a T7200 Core 2 Duo Processor and 2 Gb of PC-5300 SDRAM
memory. Based on what others have been using successfully, this will be more
than enough processing power. I'm hoping it will also handle recording
bandwidths 400 kHz when the Perseus designer implements this capability. My
500gb hard drive has an eSata interface, as well as my laptop. I plan to get
another large HD, and I am hoping the eSata format's faster data transfer
will handle the 400 kHz requirements when it comes to speed to/from the
buffers.

Guy