Thanks to the new FDXA Es alarm ring via WhatsApp I was live on the FM band from the very beginning on June 25th evening when Sporadic E woke up with cx to a quite wide angle from Croatia to Belgium. Later on began a rather common final cx session with Romania on the band. My DX equipments on fire in Toivio Pirkkala were Sony XDR-receiver with the genius Polish software XDR-GTK and a 5-element Triax FM-yagi with rotator on the roofing top.
A Hungarian voice on 107,2 MHz faded away and soon I noted the very first Romanian station of this session on 107,6 at 1739 UTC: commercial break going on and after 40 seconds a clear Pro FM id, then more spots. Will be most fascinating to check the minidisk and possibly find some track with local origin from the ads.
Few days later I had headphones on beside my Sony JB920 –minidisk deck and the 107,6 track really gave nice local identity for Pro FM: A hotel-restaurant and another firm from Oradea! Quick look to the map: Oradea is located close to the border of Hungary and it´s officially bilingual while 25 % speak Hungarian. As a 10th biggest city in the country with population almost like in Tampere Oradea (Nagyvárad in Hungarian) is not as well-known as Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár) which takes the major tourist streams in Romanian Transylvania.Putting then the station to OnLine Log I noticed that JTK has caught the same commercial break in Helsinki 3 minutes later when Pro FM already had faded to zero in Pirkkala, and that station is underlined and marked with plus. So if earlier loggings will not appear later on, my sudden reception of Pro FM Oradea local break was luckily the very first in Finland. After many years I even enjoyed to send a reception report to a FM-station and quickly got brief e-mail verification from the vanzari (sales) department. So my first FM FFF QSL came true, at least at the moment.
Little bit later on I got to know that the honour of the first catch in Finland with “+” in statics any more does not go to the chronologically first listener, but according to new rules to the quickest OnLineLog logger. Sounds little bit confusing although of course the total change in FM DXing environment due to the SDR mass recordings, in good and bad, and possible “shirking” of own loggings and “screening” of others loggings must be considered somehow. Perhaps could be also valued that live catches could be treated in a different way in statistics, i.e. should there be some reasonable period of time to check live recordings to ensure the identification and for instance the local status of reception rather than rush it right away as a raw material in the OLL? Perhaps this would be a more fair deal, especially to not so experienced FM-DXers. Luckily one particular log entry is not as important to me as the listening itself, even though concerning my first potential plus-logging on FM. On the other hand, naturally if there are statistics, there must be some rules and rules should be as equitable and practical as possible. Not so easy task in our time as in many ways seems that only change is permanent. :-)
73 JVH
