RadioBanter - Upping your catch rate

wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 2009 09:53:46 UTC, wrote:

Over the last two seasons I have had some great success, including
getting two catches of a lifetime. So I got to wondering why things
had got so much better in the last two seasons compared with the very
many years I have been DXing (43).

The radio's have improved and undoubtedly the instant availability of
9 and 10 kHz steps have made it quicker to get around the MW band,
particularly over the crucial TOH (Top of Hour) segment when the
station ID's come in. This gave an advantage over my old Drake R8B as
it could not have the steps so easily set. But this factor was not
really the reason my hit rate of stations ID' had improved so much.

Then in a brilliant flash I realised that the single biggest factor in
vastly improving my hit rate was the acquisition of a top line mp3
recorder (an Edirol R-09). I realised that over my old Sony MiniDisc
that was laborious to record on, I now had complete freedom to record
endlessly whatever was on the air. With the old Sony, I didn't record
more that one hour in four days of DXpeditioning, whereas now, with
the huge 70 hour capacity of the mp3 my recording rate had shot up to
seven hours over the same period.

With the necessity to work quickly over the TOH, I simply write in my
log the recording ID number and the minutes and seconds mark I heard
an ID on, even though I do not recognise it myself at that time. I
then move on to gather as many TOH ID's as I can. After the session I
go back over the recording ID's and write them up in my logs, but many
cannot be easily ID' in the field and require more intensive
investigation when you are at your home QTH with all your facilities.

My two magnificent lifetime catches had come this way - it was only
days later at home QTH after intensive investigation that the two
catches revealed themselves and were subsequently successfully QSL'd.

Hi John,
Do you still get the old postcard QSL's? I was just wondering, or do
you just log them as received. I have an old shoe box with plenty of
QSL's received when I was in jr/sr high school with my old
Hallicrafters S-120! Do stations even send the postcard QSL's
anymore?

Some do, some don't. Some will verify via email, and some might even send a nice
jpeg or word doc. that one can print off.

As with the case of my recent QSL of KFGO, Fargo, ND, I sent a prepared card
which they signed and returned to me.

The prepared card method seemed to work well with SW stations that didn't always
have their own card. That worked well with many Indonesian stations.

Best bet is to keep trying and attempt to find out what works for a particular
station.

dxAce
Michigan
USA