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Convention 2013!

Posted by Admin | February 15, 2013

Convention 2013 will be a combined convention of the WTFDA, NRC, IRCA and Minnesota DX Club. It will be held August 1 to August 4, 2013 in Minneapolis. The hotel selected for the convention is the Holiday Inn Bloomington South Airport Mall in Minneapolis.The hotel provides free transportation to and from the airport. They will host the Saturday night banquet.

Make your reservations now to get the special convention rate. Call the Holiday Inn at 952-884-8211 and use the registration code "NRC" to get the discount of $79.00 per night. Tax is included. Registration is $45.00 for members and guests.

Make your check or money order payable to "National Radio Club". Send it to Skip Dabelstein, 8008 North Iron Bridge Drive, Tuscon, AZ 85743. Please register early!

You can also register on-line HERE or get more detailed information. If you are using Paypal please add one more dollar to cover Paypal's fees.

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Updated Canadian Low Band List

Although analog television has ended in Canada, there are still a few analog signals to be found there.

We present an updated list of all analog and digital television stations on lowband TV (ch 2 through 6). Channel 4 seems to be a good one to watch for DTV DX. Powers, though, are fairly low.

This list was compiled by Doug Smith, w9wi and updated by William Hepburn through  03/01/2013.   If you'd like to see the list, just click here.

Update 4/2/13: One of the few remaining high power analog stations left on the air in Canada, CKND ch2 Minnedosa, MB has filed to switch to DTV and move from ch2 to ch9.

The Mexican DTV Transition

Mexico has significantly modified their DTV transition plan. The Mexican analog drop-dead date is now December 31, 2015. As in Canada, stations in small cities will not be required to convert at all. However, a far larger proportion of Mexican stations are in areas that ARE required to convert.

Mexico is discouraging, but not prohibiting, use of channels 2-6 and 38-51 for DTV use.

(Update 4/10/13)Just as in the U.S. digital transition, the Mexican government is assigning second channels to their analog stations for transitional DTV use. As in the U.S., stations will eventually elect whether to use these new second channels, or their existing analog channels, for permanent DTV operation.

DTV stations in the US and Canada use MPEG-2 compression to encode their video. Mexico will allow MPEG-2 BUT they will also allow use of the more efficient H.264 compression encoder. Some use of H.264 has already been observed in use in Mexico. H.264 is not compatable with most US TV receivers.

Some analogs going dark: XEFB-2 2013, XEFE 2 2013, XEPM 2 2013, XEWO 2 2014, XHI 2 2015, XHRIO 2 2013, XHTAU 2 2015, XHP 3 2014, XET 6 2013.

From the August VHF-UHF Digest by Doug Smith, TV News editor. Oct. 11, 2012

For a list of shut down dates by city, see the complete list at Danny Oglethorpe's website.

-->(Update 6/10/13) The analog TV shut down in Tijuana has been delayed until July 18th due to the lack of converter boxes. Read about it here.

About WTFDA

WTFDA is the only Radio hobby club in North America that caters to the TV and FM DXer, as well as the amateur radio operator who looks for DX on 6 meters. The term "DX" means "distant reception", and those who "DX" look for weak, distant radio and television signals, with an eye to logging as many of these distant signals as possible or obtaining the most distant reception of a given station. TV and FM signals normally only travel 50 to 100 miles out from their transmitters. DXers love to push the reception boundaries of stations by hundreds or thousands of miles by using their skills, better antennas and equipment, and knowing when conditions are ripe for it.

Learn more...

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Attention UHF antenna nuts: Prepare to have your minds blown. Click HERE.