Fineware

Description

FineWare is essentially me, Mark J. Fine. I first became interested in the Shortwave hobby quite by accident. Dating myself, this obsession first began circa 1974, as a freshman at Marlboro High School, Marlboro, NJ. I was always interested in trying to receive distant radio stations, basically to hear sports or music programs and looked for ways to increase the range of the AM and FM sections on my el-cheapo stereo. Having built a battery eliminator in Electronics Shop, I thought that it helped to increase the range of a walkie talkie (a toy) that I had laying about. Being an ignorant neophyte in electronics at the time, I decided to try to attach it in some way to the stereo. As fate would have it (and kids, please don't try this at home) I connected the output of the battery eliminator across the gang tuner of the stereo's AM tuner. The battery eliminator was not plugged in, but I switched on the tuner to see what I could hear. What I heard was a ticking sort of sound. Before I was able to turn the tuner off, thinking that I had screwed something up, a man announced the time. I was astonished at my very first SW reception (ad hoc as it was) of WWV. Before long I was tuning up and down the dial finding various English and foreign language radio stations. When I mentioned to my shop teacher (a Ham Radio operator) what I had done, he told me that I had stumbled onto Shortwave Radio. He recommended that I get a copy of Popular Electronics, which had a quarterly shortwave guide in it. I then learned that you could write reception reports to the stations and get some pretty neat stuff in the mail. I was hooked. I grew out of my barely-calibrated mock-up of a shortwave radio and bought an Archer regenerative kit from Radio Shack. Little did I know the real meaning of barely-calibrated. Regenerative radios are even more hit-or-miss than my original rig, which essentially consisted of two 2000 µF filter capacitors I had chunked in parallel across the 365 µF AM gang tuner in my stereo. The regen didn't last long, and I soon graduated up to a DX-160. It seemed to take almost a millenium as I waited for the radio to be back-ordered by the Radio Shack in nearby Freehold, NJ. The DX-160 lasted almost through my college years, while living at the Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), in Newark, NJ; and working as a cooperative student Electrical Engineer at the Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) at Fort Monmouth, NJ. I graduated as an EE, specializing in radio communications from NJIT in 1982, and bought my first portable receiver with a digital readout - a Sony ICF-2001. The 2001 went just about everywhere: to work (I continued on at Fort Monmouth as a GS-0855) and to the beach at Avon, where my wife LuAnn and I were weekend regulars (we were married in May 1983 in Hackettstown, NJ). Back then you could listen to news and music on AFRTS, WUSA, WRNO and the BBC World Service. Between work and other things in the early to mid-80s I took a long sabbatical from shortwave. I had already stopped sending reception reports to stations in 1984 since they were becoming harder and more frustrating to get.

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