[Introduction] [Settings] [Operation] [Maps] [FAQ]




DX Monitor

Operation


Connect to the internet if you are not already connected. You must be connected when you first request information by pressing one of the buttons. After the first connection has been established, you may connect and disconnect from the network at will. It is not necessary to quit DX Monitor.

I hope the buttons are self explanatory. Press 25, 250, or 1000 to manually retrieve recent DX activity.

Recent WWV numbers are displayed on the toolbar. The arrows indicate the trend. Move the cursor over the numbers to see the date and time they were posted.

Press the WWV button for a listing of the latest. 25 WWV entries. If you are in Auto mode, the WWV information is updated once an hour.

Press the ANN button to view the latest 25 announcements. If you wish to make an announcement of your own, fill in the bottom line of the Announcements form and press the Send button, or the Enter key.

To announce a rare DX station, click on the Spot button. Fill in the form, and press Send. Please do not "test" spotting without entering a real DX station that you can hear. Please use your own call to make announcements.

DX Monitor


If you click on a callsign, the country, short path beam heading, distance, and sunrise and sunset times will be displayed in the bottom left panel. If the map is visible, the location of the DX will be spotted on the map in red and the callsign displayed. If the Callbook is installed, the US state will be displayed and the beam heading will be more accurate for US stations.

If you double click on a call the Callbook data will be displayed in a popup window (if you have enabled this option in the settings). If the QRZ online database has been enabled, your web browser will find the station in the QRZ database. If the CD has been removed and reinserted, or was inserted after DX Monitor had started, press F10 to force DX Monitor to detect the Callbook CDrom. You can also press F11 at any time to bring up the Callbook window and enter calls manually. If there is no CDrom present, the beam heading and sunrise/sunset times will be displayed based on the prefix and you can plot the station location on the maps or access the QRZ database online.


Callbook




Schedule Alerts

At the right of the toolbar, the current date and time are displayed. Click on this clock to bring up the sked window. Enter the date and time of any new skeds, along with a comment, such as the call and frequency. DX Monitor will sound an alarm and display the sked when the time comes. The particular wav file that is played can be changed at any time. You will find lots of them in c:\windows\media, especially if you have 95 Plus. Other good ones are in the MS Office sound directory or you can record your own. Pressing F5 will also show the Sked Window.




DX Alerts


DX Alerts

Press F5, or select Set DX alerts from the Tools menu to specify the prefixes or stations you want to work. When they are spotted, a message box will appear showing the frequency. This is also true if the DX station makes a spot announcement. Calls from this list will show up in red on the announcement list so you will be sure to see them. If you wish a custom WAV file for each prefix, place the filename after the prefix. DX Monitor is still in beta testing. There have been numerous requests for band or mode specific alarms. These features will be added soon. Therefore, I don't recommend you spend much time creating alarms now. The format will change and you will have to enter them all again. [Warning: this paragraph has not changed in 3 years.] It is best to use this feature for stations you know are on the air that you are watching for.




Filters


Filters

As a result of an overwhelming number of requests, frequency filtering has been added to DX Monitor. Press F7 or select Filters from the Options menu. Enter the ranges you wish to observe. Check the box to Enable Filters. Stations spotted outside these ranges will be totally ignored by the program. Be to sure to enter the frequency in KHz.




Sorting

The display may be sorted by any column. The easy way is to click on the title at the head of the column. Each click will reverse the order of the sort. You can also select the sort you wish from the Sort menu. When new spots are loaded, the sort order reverts to descending order by time.






Searching

Press ctl-F or select from the Edit menu. You can search for any text in the list of spots. Press F3 to continue searching for a second spot.




Editing

Press ctl-E or select Enable Edit from the Edit menu to enable editing of the display. This can be used to correct a callsign. Press ctl-E again to turn editing off.

Delete Row (Shift-Del) can also be used to delete a line if garbage data finds its way into the display.




Web Menu

For your convenience, a few URLs to the DX Summit site have been hard coded into the DX Monitor program. These are listed under the Web menu. Selecting any item on this list will tell your default browser to load the selected page. If you suspect that DX Monitor is not working, it is a good idea to check DX Summit directly to see if the server is temporarily down.




Help Menu

The manual for DX Monitor is provided in html format. Links to the manual pages are provided on the Help menu. These pages are displayed on your default browser.


Check for Updates...

Selecting Check for Updates... from the Help menu will cause the program to display the Version window. This window shows you which version of DX Monitor you are currently running and what version is the latest official release. The program checks for a new release once a day. If you are not running the latest version, you will be alerted and this window will appear. You can manually check for the latest version of the program and the CTY.DAT file by pressing the Check Now button. Pressing the Download button will take you to the DX Monitor web page, from which you can download the latest version. Pressing the Download CTY.DAT button will download the latest CTY.DAT file.

The date of the CTY.DAT file on your computer should be later than the "latest" available CTY.DAT file. This is because the local file date reflects the date it was downloaded.


Bug Reports and Feedback... will open your email program so that you can send email to

peterj@benlo.com
.


Join Support Mailing List will send your web browser to the DX Monitor Home Page where there is a form to fill out to join the mailing list. You can also join by sending a blank email message to:
dxmon–subscribe@listbot.com



DX Summit Web Page will send your web browser to the DX Summit home page. This is where the information that makes DX Monitor work comes from.


NCDXF/IARU Beacons will send your web browser to the NCDXF/IARU Beacons home page.


DX Monitor Home Page will send your web browser to the DX Monitor home page.


About DX Monitor... will display the DX Monitor copyright information and some information about your system.




Automatic Operation


Press the AUTO button to begin automatic operation. The button will change from green to red. When it is red, pressing it will stop automatic operation.

Every 5 minutes (or the time period you have entered), DX Monitor will access the latest DX announcements. If all of the retrieved spots are new, the program will retrieve the most recent 250. If these are new and you have a "retain" setting greater than 250, the program will retrieve the most recent 1000 spots.

When you first start DX Monitor, all you need do is press the Auto button to fully update the DX list. Remember to connect to the net first. If you were running in AUTO mode when you quit DX Monitor, it will start up in AUTO mode the next time the program is run. After DX Monitor loads, you have 5 seconds to press ESC if you wish to abort automatic operation.

In automatic mode DX Monitor will update the WWV numbers, Announcements, and UTC clock once each hour.

When you are in automatic mode, you can disconnect from the net at any time. When a retrieval fails, the status bar will indicate [Network unavailable]. Every couple of minutes DX Monitor will continue to retry. When you dial in again, the program will update the display as needed and announce any DX station that you have listed in your alarm list. Even when DX Monitor is minimized, it will continue to operate and watch for your needed stations. You can read your email or surf the web while DX Monitor does the "work" for you.

Automatic Map Plotting

The map button on the toolbar (between the Auto and Stop buttons) will display the Azimuthal Projection map with the Terminator line and the current DX spots. This map will automatically update the spots meeting the criteria selected in the Plot menu as new spots come in if the Automatic Refresh option is selected. If the Automatic Wallpaper option is checked in the Options Menu of the map, the map will be displayed on the desktop as it is updated. The program may be minimized and operates in the background.



Importing Files

It is possible to import pages saved using Netscape or Internet Explorer. Select Import... from the File menu. You can only import the DX Summit pages with this command. Other pages may crash the program.



Spots with corrected times ©

The spot time is sent by the DX cluster from which the spot originated. Some clusters have their clocks set incorrectly. If a spot is received for a time which is in the future, the time is "corrected" to the current time and the © symbol is displayed beside it.



Files Associated with DX Monitor

CTY.DAT

In order to determine the location of DX spots, DX Monitor uses the CTY.DAT file created by K1EA Software for the excellent CT contest logging program. This file is updated regularly by Jim Reisert, AD1C, to include new countries and special prefixes. The latest version can be obtained from http://www.contesting.com/ct/files/cty.dat. Once a day, DX Monitor checks the date of the latest CTY.DAT file and compares it with the one you are using. If your file appears to be older than the latest version, the program will download the new one and replace the old one. The old file will be saved as CTY.OLD, and you will be alerted to the change.

CTY.DAT does not show locations more accurately than by country. In the case of larger countries that have geographically accurate prefixes (VE, VK, PY, UA) there is a subfile, REGIONS.DAT, which is used to locate stations from those countries. Special prefixes are translated to the "normalized" prefix for the country, which is used to look up the location. An entry can be created with any particular callsign to customize the location for the map and beam heading. I would appreciate help from users who add to this data file. Please send me your additions or changes. The file is in fixed column format.

RACCD32A.DLL

This DLL is used to access the Callbook CDrom. Even if you don't have the CD, it must be available for DX Monitor at startup. It can be placed in the same folder with the dxmon.exe executable, or it can be moved to your WINDOWS or WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory. If you have already installed this file for another program, it is best to use only one of them at a time.

BEACONS.TXT

This tab delimited file is used to describe the timing and frequencies of active beacons. If the beacons change, the file can be modified. It is in tab-delimited format suitable for editing with any spreadsheet program or a text editor which does not modify the format.

TIME.TXT

This plain text file contains a list of time servers which can be used to retrieve the current correct time.

WORLD.BMP This is a Windows bitmap file containing the Mercator projection world map. The Azimuthal projection map is created from this map. If you wish to change the colors or improve the map, just make sure the locations don't move. Please share any improvements with all of us by sending me a copy.

dxmon.htm The HTML files contain the program documentation in the form of browsable local web pages. The *.gif and *.jpg files are used to present graphics in these web pages.




Files created by DX Monitor

DXSPOTS.TXT contains the data displayed in the grid.
ANNOUNCE.TXT contains the latest announcements.
WWV.TXT contains the latest WWV numbers.
DXMON.INI contains the settings for DX Monitor.
TIME.LOG contains the log of adjustments made to the system clock in RTF format.
DXALARMS.TXT contains the DX alerts you have created.
SKEDS.TXT contains the time alarms that you have created.
OLDSPOTS.TXT contains the old DX spots which have scrolled off the bottom of the grid.
37122.BMP contains the azimuthal map for 37 degrees north, 122 degrees west. Yours will have a similar name with your latitude and longitude.
VERSION.TXT contains the last version information downloaded daily.
\TMP is a directory which is created while the program is running. It is deleted when the program exits normally. If the program crashes, the files in this directory may contain clues to the problem.



[Introduction] [Settings] [Operation] [Maps] [FAQ]