I might be one of the most vocal WWW enthusiasts, spending most of the time sailing on the virtual world. But if you look inside me though my iris, deep down you will find traces of pain, pain of loosing something that used to be my passion. Something that lost its glory in the cyber explosion, struggling to survive, I know in vein...I am talking about the hobby called DXing...simply it means distance listening...What does DXers do is to listen to the numerous radio stations on air (mostly in Short Wave)...you are the amateur monitors of the radio broadcast, world wide...It can be from any of the stations, BBC, VOA, Deutch Wella(The Voice of Germay), Radio French International...list goes on an on...you switch on the radio in SW band, keep rotating the tuner knob...if you rotate fast, you will hear some ku ku ki kyu...tu toui...like sound..but if you be careful and patient enough, one of those sound will turn out to be a station, transmitting some where from a remote part of the world...might be it is Radio Prague or Radio Philippines or from some region you have never heard about so far...in spite of all the noise and fluctuation you listen to the programmes...at the end of each programme or transmission there will be an announcement about the broadcaster, it's mailing address. You send a reception report, how you found the programme and wait for the response...often a nicely written letter by the audience relations with some gifts...
At times you might find excitement in those letters...the broadcaster, not even in their dreams, expected some one as remote as you to listen to their programmes...you will find you are short of words to express the joy in your heart after reading those lines...
It was a source of plain excitement for me...excitement that is pure...the adventure or discovering a new world in the form a new station every day...excitement of getting on hand result, finding that each and every bit of blood you spend will lead you to a new potpourri of knowledge and information...you feel that you can stretch yourself beyond your limits.
But advancement of cyber media just leads it to extinction. Radio stations too are available at the click of mouse, 24X7...With the monster called Google, finding them is even more easy...so there's no fun in finding them...since you do not have to take pain, you hardly listen to the online transmission seriously...there's no excitement...no part of the world is remote now a days..
You find some, You loose some.....
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