AN INTERNATIONAL VISITOR

TO THE RADIO SHACK

Recently, my wife and I were delighted to receive a visit from long-time Japanese DXer Hiroo Nakagawa 7M3MJO and his wife, Kaoru-san. They are from Yokohama and were touring through Melbourne and Sydney for a few days.

We had a lovely time over afternoon tea. Of course, our five-year-old twin granddaughters also provided plenty of entertainment, including displaying their skills at reciting their numbers in Japanese and playing games with Kaoru-san!

Hiroo-san visited the Mount Evelyn radio shack, where we talked about receivers, plus shortwave and mediumwave reception in Australia. I also showed Hiroo-san my current antenna setup, and we looked through a few of my old verification letters from 1970s Latin American shortwave broadcasters.

Starting out in shortwave DXing, Hiroo-san now spends much of his time DXing mediumwave bands and FM-DX. He has a fine collection of older receivers, including Icom, Yaesu, Sony, Panasonic, Kenwood, AOR, and JRC models. However, these days, he enjoys using Perseus and Airspy SDR. Hiroo also travels on DXpeditions whenever the opportunity arises.

Hiroo-san is an active member of the Totsuka DXers Circle, established in August 2012 and based in Yokohama. This small club comprises Japanese DXers who grew up with the BCL boom of the 1970s and 80s. The club exchanges DX information between members, has meetings, and undertakes DXpeditions.

Every year, they produce a fantastic book called Propagation, which is distributed free as a PDF and has a small print run of around 30 copies for their own use. This year's book, released in August, is Edition #12 and is 221 pages long. There are a few articles in English, but most of the book is in Japanese. It is a beautiful production with lots of text and photos. You can download a copy of the book here.

I was honoured to receive from Hiroo-san a specially printed copy of the
latest edition of the Totuska DXers Circle book Propagation.

Jan and I were delighted that Hiroo-san and Kaoru-san could visit us. One of the good things about our unique hobby is that we can meet friends from around the world.

73 and good DX to you all,

Rob Wagner VK3BVW