by Karl D. Forth

Richard E. Wood may have been the best-known DXer ever.

I first met him briefly at a radio convention in the mid-1970s; it may have been Columbus or Atlanta. A friend, Robert Kramer, had met him earlier and hadn’t enjoyed his first encounter. Rob had asked Richard to autograph his copy of the book “How to Listen to the World,” and apparently Richard, the closest thing to a celebrity in the hobby, had for some reason refused.

A few years later, Richard was teaching languages at Southeast Missouri State University. With fellow DXers Rob Kramer (who had forgiven the earlier snub) and Jeff Roberts, we traveled from our college, Southern Illinois University, to visit Richard.

We were recruited to erect a television antenna on the roof of his house in Cape Girardeau so he could TV DX. There was moderate, persistent rain, and the roof was a bit slippery. Richard supervised our efforts but didn’t join us on the roof. Our own 1970s interest in television DX led us to understand the urgency of the antenna raising. (We also bought Coors beer that was then unavailable east of the Mississippi River.)

That day, I asked Dr. Wood which languages he was studying, and he said he was brushing up on his Albanian, producing a German-Albanian dictionary to support this claim.

Richard, originally from Newcastle, England, was a regular contributor to all of the DX clubs, providing important updates and useful information. He had taught in Indiana, Baton Rouge, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Hawaii, and other locations. Hawaii was his favorite location, and he showed that you could receive most of the world on mediumwave from those islands.

He was very intelligent and rubbed some people the wrong way.

He was also a prolific writer, authoring Shortwave Voices of the World (the Finnish version outsold the English), How to Listen to the World, and the Communications Handbook magazine in the 1970s.

Richard also developed a language recognition course, and studied and wrote about propagation and other subjects.

My last visit with Richard was in early 2007, when my wife and I were vacationing on the Big Island, and we rented a house for a week not far from Richard’s base in the Hawaiian Paradise Park development, southeast of Hilo. We visited Richard several times in Hilo, where he sold local coffee at a space in the market, and we went to his source of Kona coffee farther south on Hawaii Island. For the rest of the trip, the rental car had the rich aroma of the Kona coffee cargo. Richard and I talked about DXing, especially mediumwave DXing from Hawaii, which was his current focus. With my portable radio on that trip I had received two California local channel stations at a distance of 2300 miles. My wife observed that our conversation about DXing was like listening to two people speak another language.

Richard died of a heart attack in Hawaii at the age of 67 in September 2007.

Karl D. Forth has been interested in radio and DXing for more than 50 years. This story was included in the book Radio Nights and Distant Signals.

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