If you’ve perused the left navigation column at NMHams.com, you’ve probably discovered our all new DX Spot application. It’s an RSS grabber that propagates the #DX search over at Twitter.com. If you haven’t visited Twitter yet, check it out! It’s been described as the “heartbeat of the Internet”, a 140 character world of comments and information, a microblog environment where you can share what’s on your mind and follow what’s on others.

Digging a bit deeper into how the DX spots get to Twitter, and to us.. Many come via DXSummit, through the VE3SUN DX Monitor software, which has a hook to spit spots to Twitter.

There’s also a tantalizing Twitter account, W5UGD, through which John Hoyt fires spots from the #marac dx spot interface over at irc.superhosts.net. Notice the “irc” at the head of that last Internet address? That stands for Internet Relay Chat, the granddaddy of all Internet communication mechanisms. Not as many folks use IRC these days, but it’s still a robust and customizable system that hams sometimes use to augment emergency communications.

And we can’t forget Telnet. Telnet is another of the early Internet applications from the days when plain text ruled the web. Just about every computer operating system has a terminal program built in. You can use it to Telnet into DX Clusters that send DX spots as they are reported. It’s textual so you have to learn the language of telnet to control how you get your DX feed, but it’s possible to customize what you see to meet your specific tastes. You can also send your own spots via Telnet, too.

If you want a full featured GUI DX application, there are a ton of choices out there for whatever operating system you prefer from Linux, to Windows, even for the IPhone.

But, whether you Telnet, tweet or have your own application, with our special DX cluster monitor here at NMHams.com, you’ve got the latest spots whenever you visit.

Scott Westerman – W9WSW – is the New Mexico Technical Coordinator for the American Radio Relay League.