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Modern Care and Feeding of Your Priceless DX Catch Lists

Steve Green NEPA

Steve Green NEPA

Back in the late 60's near JFK Airport in Queens, one of the four DXing insomniacs -- the newest one of us -- began keeping track of his individual 'catches' on index cards arranged by frequency in a little silver box. Last I heard, he still has that museum method intact today, as closely preserved as his own ..... uh ..... well, pick your personal priority. The rest of us, each with a bit more than 1500 different AM catches from back when cx were friendlier, used other methods. Updating eventually became a problem. My process was putting big dots next to stations in published logbooks, with occasional write-ins and dots for foreign stations from other countries, or split-frequency ones.
Well, computers, as ever making life easier for all of civilization, seemed like a wonderful safe-deposit box for such crucial lifelong endowments. I learned how to do a spreadsheet (and of course only then went back and read the directions) and came up with mine.
My question is : how does one handle BACKUPS for your main Holy Grail list, just in case? What with all the 'upgrades' and different XP and Vistaa and W7 towers and weekly apps and laptops and thumb-drive availabilities, smart-phones and Cloud cubicles plus other digital pigeonholes, how do YOU folks keep up and preserve your most permanent, important, updated, cherished hobby bounty in 2023 ?
Index-card boxes, lol ?
 
All FM logs are stored on two Excel documents - one for Ellensburg, one for Yakima. I add to them shortly after the most recent Es opening, or Tr/Ms catch.

My AM logs are stored on a Notepad document, organized by state and also by frequency. The last 10 years or so of logs have been logged with the date of reception.

Both are also kept on a 1TB backup hard drive.
 
I use an Excel spreadsheet with separate tabs for AM, FM, Weather band, SW, and LW loggings. I include frequency, call, location, reception details, transmitter power, signal strength, date/time, and receiver/antenna. The AM and FM tabs are the most actively updated by far.

Usually I update the file as soon as I can after a new logging. During FM Es season I’m often way behind with the updates because of the number of new loggings.

In the column of each tab where I enter the reception details for a station, I add notes when I find out (or actively hear) that the station has changed formats.

The file is stored on my main computer. I keep it backed up to a portable hard drive, and I use Dropbox to share it with my phone and laptop so my loggings are ready to view when DXing.
 
no paper or digital written log..... no excel, notepad or wordpad ... just mp3 files with station name frequency, city, time and date

stored on a cloud server and my pc
 
I haven't made any logbooks, mostly because I'm mostly just a casual DXer, and I never thought to do so.

Perhaps I should start?

c
 
SomeRadioGuy said:
no paper or digital written log..... no excel, notepad or wordpad ... just mp3 files with station name frequency, city, time and date

stored on a cloud server and my pc
Click to expand...

I also try to record my loggings as much as possible and save them as mp3 files, which are backed up to the same portable hard drive as my Excel log.
 
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