Saturday, December 25, 2004

The life of distance

No childhood obsession was more formative for me than what its practitioners call DXing: listening to faraway radio stations (DX being the old ham radio shorthand for distance). Most of New York's AM radio stations were within a bike ride of my house (not far from New Jersey's salty tidewaters, which were ideal locations for AM transmitters). WABC's tower loomed outside my bedroom window, and put out a signal so strong you could hear it in the toaster. Yet, even in such a disadvantaged location, I still managed to log over a thousand AM signals from all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico and various islands in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

WSM/650 and WWVA/1170 taught me to love country music. WLAC/1510 taught me to love blues. Both WSM and WLAC came from Nashville, which owes its Music City name in large measure to these two great radio stations, which blanketed the eastern U.S. at night. And I was hardly the only one. James Taylor credits WLAC with informing his tastes when he was growing up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. David Ezell puts it this way:

The freedom of the AM airwaves in the late '60s broadened the young Ezell's musical palette considerably. "WLAC, WLS, were these AM stations," he recalls. "At night, you could pick them up out of Nashville, Knoxville or New York City with the old transistor radio, because back then a lot of the stations would go off the air at 6 o'clock and free up the airwaves."

Note the word "freedom."

Anyway, all this comes to mind with what Marc Eisenstadt writes about DXing.

I’ve long thought (and commented on Many2Many and also in a posting here that the love of DXing is a still a key driver that attracts people to certain VoIP, videoconf and IRC-style apps; indeed I figure it’s one of the reasons people like our HitMaps , because HitMaps are a kind of micro-QSL (QSL = amateur-radio-speak for ‘verification’)… each HitMaps dot is a little verification that ’someone out there’ is paying attention, and people really love that kind of external validation, in a way that’s fundamentally different from seeing a bland number on a traditional ‘hit counter’.

Agreed.

Twas the night...

At 9:24pm last night, Chris Pirillo announced his engagement to Latthana, aka Ponzi, who made the same announcement at 9:42