Rijn Muntjewerff, TV DX'ing

[kenglish]

Today is the 6th anniversary of the date that Rijn Muntjewerff passed away (2014) in the Netherlands.
He was possibly the world's most well known TV DX'er, with his envious antenna set-up at his home on the polder (flat farmland, reclaimed from the sea) in Beemster.
Anyone else here a fan of TV DX'ing?

[Terry]

I was an involuntary TV DXer decades ago. While watching KUTV2 I noticed it being washed out by another channel 2 somewhere far away. I got so concerned that I called KUTV, but they acted as though I were a nut. Then on channel 3 I watched KGLO3 CBS-TV in Mason City, Iowa. As the hours passed I saw several different channel 3’s, some even in Canada and Mexico.

I did learn later that this sort of thing was typically a summertime event and had something to do with sunspots.

[kenglish]

I have a few VHS tapes of low-band VHF stations from Mexico.
My favorite DX, though, was in July after the analog shut down...
I was playing with a pocket-sized scanner at my desk at home, and heard Oprah on the former KUTV aural frequency. I went outside, and it was even stronger. I turned on the TV and saw a nearly perfect signal. Watching for a while, I saw commercials for a furniture store in Canada.
I finally got an ID, and was able to contact the station, which was just a bit north of New York state. Their engineer and I compared notes, and determined it was their second channel, a full-power channel 2 (CKCO, if I remember).
I took field-strength readings in Midvale, and it was as strong as KUTV would have been in Ogden or Provo! And, the signal stayed that way for over 24 hours. It was a double-hop Troposperic Duct, with two strong weather patches across the Great Lakes and the midwest.
Turns out the station was legendary with DXers for years.

I later learned that the station had to give up their license when a new owner of the land where the access road to their site got his "panties in a bunch" over some tree-trimming issues, and would not accept the previous agreement for access. The power line failed in a storm, and the generator ran for weeks until it failed.
The tower crew chief who did the DTV Utah antenna for the repack in 2019, told me that his Uncle was the original property owner, and their company (Grundy) was the one that took down that famous stack of steel and copper.
Small world!

[CAwasinNJ]

I used to do the occasional TV DX when I ran into the right conditions. Today I'm afraid it's mostly gone. With digital TV you would have to first overcome the digital cliff effect, which isn't easy. Then you'd have to deal with rescanning and hoping it locks in. Do most TVs these days even have a way to manually select an RF channel that wasn't identified during a scan? On top of that, with the 2009 transition and the 2018-20 repack some large percentage of the US stations at least are all jammed into channels 14-36 and even if another decent powered signal was coming from far away it would get swamped by the local. You might get lucky with the VHF channels but those don't work very well for digital.

I do have a fun DX story about FM though. It happened sometime back in the early 90's when I was living outside of New York City. At the time the New York Times owned classical outlet 96.3 WQXR-FM. Being a fairly unobjectionable station it was used as the audio for a local cable access channel that ran computer generated non-profit announcements when it was "off the air." WQXR used to sign off overnight early Monday mornings every week. Normally when that happened the really cheap radio they used to pick up the station off the air would lock onto the next station down the dial, WPLJ. I happened to turn on the access channel that night and was surprised to hear oldies on it and the station IDed itself as Oldies 96. I freaked out and went to check with one of my own radios to confirm what I was hearing. I was getting the same signal and it was on 96.3FM. What the heck? WQXR is gone?! I continued to listen and eventually I heard the legal ID - WNTX Nantucket/Hyannis. You can see where it was at the time at fccdata.org/?lang=en&appid=93488&facid=54037 Even better was that there was a live and local DJ on the air giving out the request line phone number. There was a problem though. He was giving it without an area code. It took some sleuthing to figure out the right one since this was an active time for area code splits. I did eventually figure it out and gave the guy a call. I told him where I was and that we were getting him all the way down in New Jersey that night. He did play my request and gave me a shout out on the air. Somewhere in storage I have the tape. I recorded several hours from the cable system that night. The signal eventually faded out and local WPLJ took over the cable system radio until WQXR came back on the air. Fun time.

[amanuensis]

In Kamas, Utah, sometimes the SLC Channel 2 was replaced by Oakland, California's when I was a kid there in the 1970s. Usually in the summer.

[kenglish]

I wonder what happened to all those photos and letters that Rijn collected over the years.
I hope they are preserved in a museum some place, so people can visit and view them. The University of Utah and BYU have vast collections like that.