|
About Demmery Software |
|
2021-11-06 Back in the late 1990s, I remember receiving a number of Cuban and other southern stations. I was convinced at the time of my receptions; but results in recent years have been much more domestic. We've been having a significant geomagnetic storm in recent days, which has really killed the usual nighttime signal propagation. Last night was a good example: across the band, I heard less than a dozen stations, most of them local, or quite distant. WLW, from Cincinnati, for example, was barely readable. Toronto, Boston and New York were all absent. One station bucking this trend was WBT, 1110, in Charlotte, NC. It was bombing in with a signal that topped the indicator. I was just about to give up on the lower part of the band, when I noticed a signal on 670. Ah, said I; Chicago. But as I listened, it clearly was not Chicago. First, the language was spanish; and, second, the accent was wrong for a typical US hispanic station. At that point, I pulled out the tablet. The only spanish-language station in range in the United States was in Virginia. Problem: the station uses three Watts of power at night; there was no way it was making the trip on that! That left Cuba. Radio Rebelde has a couple of stations on 670, and a few minutes' listening to their Internet feed confirmed that I was listening to CMBA, Arroya Arenas. The really interesting part is the alignment with the aforementioned WBT. Plotted on a map, WBT is just about at the midpoint of a line drawn between Ottawa, Ontario (the home of Demmery Software) and Arroyo Arenas, Cuba. Further, it is just about on that line. My current working theory is that there was a long auroral streamer along that alignment, reflecting the signals back. Anyway, it was an interesting evening, and led to my 876th unique logging from the Ottawa area. 2021-11-05 StationBase is now in late beta testing and will be released within a week. We are very excited about this. StationBase has been in the works for four years, originally as a web-based application, but now in desktop form. We're finishing up the user documentation now, and getting ready to put together downloads. 2021-10-29 Welcome to our new website. This site has been some time in coming. In the mid-1980s, we released a package of library routines for the Atari ST. Soon after, there followed (under Pacifica Software) the PacLink BBS. In the 1990s, we had a few small releases. In the 2010s, we began developing a comprehensive weather system. It collects information from multiple sources and generates web pages—though it's much more complicated than that. A companion program allows you to capture your own weather data for input to the system. You can see the results of this system at our Reference Implementation. We are rapidly nearing completion on a major new piece of software: StationBase, a tool for radio DXers to keep track of their loggings. Originally it was developed as a multi-user, web-based tool; but the Desktop version is now on the way. We're exited about this release. We have many other plans for software projects, which you can see on the Home Page. |