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DX Monitor

Frequently Asked Questions

Please read this list of questions before submitting a bug report or comment.



My Spot window has no 'Announce' button.
Or the About... box doesn't look right and some of the characters on the main grid are cut off at the bottom. These are all the result of using a 125% font size. The temporary fix is to adjust your Control Panel | Display | Settings | Font Size for Normal Size Font. Yes it's a bug.

I see the program access DX Summit, but no new spots show up.
  1. Check your filter settings (F7). You may be asking for spots which only occur rarely. Frequencies are in KHz, not MHz.
  2. Check your sort order. If you accidentally click on the Time header, you will sort the listing with the oldest spots at the top. The new spots will be at the bottom of the list.
  3. Look for a funny date or time that might cause DX Monitor to think that all the spots are older than the spots you have now. You can delete a line by pressing Shift-Delete.
  4. If all else fails, exit the program, delete the DXSPOTS.TXT file, and start the program.
If you suspect a problem with DX Monitor, use your web browser to compare with DX Summit output before reporting it (use the web menu in DX Monitor). When the server goes off for a few hours, I usually get a half dozen emails reporting a bug in the program!

The UTC Time for "This Computer" is incorrect.
This value is obtained directly from the operating system and displayed with no changes made by DX Monitor. There are two choices available for getting the correct combination of local and UTC time:
  1. Fake it by choosing an adjacent time zone - this works in the summer if you want to display UTC on your taskbar and have it calculated correctly for programs which use it. Choose the Azores Time Zone and set the time to UTC. In winter, switch back to GMT.
  2. Use the TZEDIT.EXE utility to create a real time zone that reflects the time zone you are in. TZEDIT works with both W95 and W98. On the W98 CDrom it is in the \tools\reskit\config folder. It is also available on the OEM SR2 CD which came with later shipments of W95 computers, but was never available retail. Documentation is available at Microsoft Article Q158195 . You can download tzedit.exe from Express Technologies.

Some garbage data got into one of the spots. How can I get rid of it?
If you need to delete bad data, individual spots can be deleted using Shift-DEL. Or you can delete the file DXSPOTS.TXT and the program will create a new clean file from the next retrieval. You can also edit individual entries by pressing ctl-e and editing right on the spreadsheet.

Will DX Monitor work from behind a firewall or with a proxy server?
Yes, DX Monitor supports proxy firewalls including those with username and password.

Will DX Monitor work with Windows NT?
Usually. It is difficult to tell when I accidentally add an incompatibility. I have to rely on feedback from NT users whenever a new version appears. Version 0.89 works. If a later version works (or breaks) for you, please let me know.

I sent a DX Spot but it didn't show up.
DX spots are sent via the form on the DX Summit web site. Before the DX Summit site was created, they were actually sent via packet to a DX Cluster and worked their way back to the internet. Sometimes one of the links was down. The new DX Summit site has eliminated this step and spotting should be much more reliable.

When will you do a version for Windows 3.11? Macintosh?
It is not likely to happen.

It is January and I can't see any new spots!
The new spots are probably going to the bottom of the list. If you are using the current version of DX Monitor, the list will be sorted into the correct order. If not, the program assumes that 12-31 is later than 01-01. No year is provided with incoming spots. The "fixing" of December dates is only performed until January 15. After that, if you still have December spots in your list, they will be assumed to be later than the January ones. This is to save the extra time required to fix the dates before and after each sort.

What tools were used to program DX Monitor?
DX Monitor was written using the Inprise/Borland Delphi 4 Development Environment. The Winsock interface was written using the excellent freeware Internet Component Suite developed by François Piette.


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