True, though you can probably hear the splatter from an even frequency station if you’re on the adjacent odd frequency and then tune up/down 100 kHz using the arrow keys.
Assuming of course that the DX on the even channels is strong enough to cause splatter! Stuff like 88.2 Fiji and 90.0 Vanuatu need to be tuned directly.
Like success in any field, DXing (especially for Es) requires some hard work. Even if you use an SDR and capture the band automatically, you’ve got many, many hours of sifting through the recordings ahead of you!
Getting fleeting 2Es/3Es reception on FM requires much dedication. That’s why I only seriously DX for Es over the holiday season.
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Just an update on the Sydney TEF servers:
- South and vertical (omni): These have been joined into a single headless TEF server just called South, but both the South and Vertical antennas are accessible.
- East: There shouldn’t be any visible changes, but this is now running off a headless TEF also
Why the changes?
- Having both South and Omni on the same server allows for quick swapping of antennas to check if a station being received is a local station or if it’s been overriden with a tropo station (e.g. 107.1 Highlands FM vs ABC Local Western Plains), or which tropo station it is (e.g. 97.1 on NW is more likely to be 2MG but is more likely to be ABC RN Taree on the NE antenna)
- The non-headless TEFs had a tendency of dropping RDS after a while, or even the entire connection – the headless ones generally have a more reliable connection
- Not needing to deal with USB sound dongles
- Better RDS decoding (and possibly sensitivity? Not sure about this one)
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