It is possible to use the power of Twitter and a Twitter third party applications to enhance the radio listening hobbies. Twitter users can share listening reports more or less in real time with other radio listening enthusiasts.

There are a couple of ways this can be done. The easiest way uses keyword searches and a third party Twitter application called TweetDeck. The second is by giving a specific radio listening hobby a Twitter Hash Tag and searching for the hash tag.

When you initiate a keyword Twitter search in TweetDeck a new search results column is created. The search is saved and checked each time the application connects to Twitter. The results of a keyword search find current tweets with your keyword. Let’s say you used DX as the search term. Any Twitterer using the letters DX would appear in the search. What we do to make the search more unique is to make a search acronym unique enough that only persons interested in our hobby will use it:

FMDX FM radio station long distance listening
AMDX AM radio station long distance listening
TVDX Television long distance reception
SWLDX Short wave listening

Scanner buffs could also create unique acronyms to use in tweets that referenced their geographic area. I’m thinking that using the GPS grid square in the name would help narrow down where the listening took place. I could be MDFM18 Maryland FM18.

The hash tag method is very similar except that a has tag is preceded with this: #. Converting the above to has tags we would have:

#FMDX
#AMDX
#TVDX
#SWLDX

A complete list of hash tags in current use appears at HashTags.org

Every once in a while you find that someone has used your favorite abbreviation. GMRS is an example. I created #POPWIRE so I could add hashtags to GMRS related tweets.

A tweet has room for 140 characters. Using the #AMDX hashtag you have 135 left. A tweet might look like:

WNAV 1430 1600EST heavy fading #AMDX

So join me on Twitter using TweetDeck and tweet your broadcast band DX!

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