Dr. DX was an amazing piece of programming for its day. I saw it at
Dayton and immediately went out and bought one plus a C-64 to run it on.
It was so realistic. The propagation algorithm was set for CQWW at
sunspot maximum. If you tried to work 160M at noon you just heard
static. Midnight on 10M produced silence.
You had guys calling with bad timing, chirpy signals, fast guys, slow
guys and lids calling CQ on your frequency. I think if you copied a
call wrong the station would send it again. Then there was the
excitement when a really rare one called you.
More than once I was playing with it thinking I needed to go to bed but
could not pull myself from a big pile up - only to whack myself on the
side the head having forgotten this was just a simulation.
They ran some Dr. DX contests in NCJ. You could set it up in contest
mode for some period of time and it produced a code that the
manufacturer could use to verify the score.
N6TR did one of his Z80 miracles and had it play against Dr. DX,
computer vs. computer. He would just crank up the speed enough to beat
the previous winner's score. There was also a trick that you did not
have to send the full call sign of of a station calling you, saving some
time.
A Windows version would be really neat.
Gary, W9XT
www.w9xt.com
On 12/17/2013 3:59 AM, Tom Osborne wrote:
I remember they had a contest to see who could work the most countries.
Problem was, some figured how to crack it and that kinda ruined it. 73
Tom W7WHY
Agreed. It was an amazing program, especially considering the theory
limitations on the Commodore 64, which had about 32K of RAM. A Windows
version would use 100 Meg :-)
Barry W2UP
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