Zach said:
rbrucecarter5 said:
Another thing that HD radio advocates did, right from the start, was to alienate the radio listening DX community by attaching labels to us such as outdated, outmoded, irrelevant, out of touch and the like.
“But you
are, Blanche
! You
are in that wheelchair.”
We DX'ers are a tiny, tiny minority these days.
I'll stop you there. The overwhelming majority of DX'ers have never even heard the term. They are the 20% of the US population living in rural areas. But even at 20%, that is still 60 million people. They don't embrace the "magic" of receiving distant stations, getting QSL cards, etc. They absolutely hate the annoyance of having weak TV and radio reception, and hate the expense of needing a large antenna. Their technical expertise probably comes from the salesman at the local hardware that carries antennas - and has learned through the years what to sell people to do the job. They probably buy TVs and radios that they have seen working at a neighbor's house. I see this all the time when I travel. You get 50 miles out of town, the houses have antennas. The farther you get, the bigger antennas. 100 miles out, you see massive masts and huge antennas. Some of them have been up there for years and are not maintained well, bent over a bit with missing elements - until the reception fades enough they have to be replaced. True, I'm seeing a lot of Dish and Direct dishes on those houses, but I usually also see an antenna because those rural folks are still invested enough in their "local" TV that they want to see it. You can tell reception patterns and city preferences by where the antennas are pointed - sometimes one farm points to one city, the next farm to another. To those folks, HD radio doesn't exist and offers no benefit. But I see a few deep fringe FM antennas on those farms, too, and it is obvious someone in that house cares enough about FM, and knows enough technically to do it right. Most rural probably just split off the TV antennas, put up with what gain the TV antenna has on FM.
But - nobody is going to call a group of 60 million people and tiny, tiny minority. If you look at the Yahoo group for vintage FM tuners, there are only 6000 members or so, now that would be a tiny minority. Even when you consider that not every FM tuner expert is a member of that forum, or knows about it - you could be talking about a substantially larger group of people - but still probably a few tens of thousands. Performance of vintage stereo equipment is starting to be known. I saw a post by a celebrity kid just the other day who found a 70's receiver gave them much better sound than their iPod dock. That kid somehow had to know how to get the iPod connector piped into RCA jacks, and somehow located and hooked up component speakers. Turntables and vinyl refuse to die, even they are used by record scratching morons for the most part. Antique technology lives on. These are all very small markets, but rural listeners are NOT. They aren't using $5 Walmart radios in their homes, they are using something much better, and somebody sold it to them, along with their antenna - or something vintage they found. They are fussing around try to deal with DTV, which probably isn't easy. So the market is out there for DX'ers, even if they don't know that they are.
