SWLing Post reader, Ken (KD5XN), writes:
I don’t know if you are familiar with the books “Fine Tuning Proceedings” that were published during the late 80s and into the 90s. They were and are a great read and source of information for the advanced hard-core shortwave DXer. There are equipment reviews, hints, suggestions on antennas, recorders, atlases, propagation etc.
A lot of information may be “dated” today, but for someone who travels and wants to kill some time reading about SWL, they are a great resource. It’s like sitting down with a veteran DXer and picking his/her brain. The authors were “giants” of the hobby back in the day.
All the books are available on a single CD for $10 from the ODXA if anyone is interested. (http://www.odxa.on.ca) I personally have the CD. I used to have all the books but unfortunately they didn’t survive many moves over the years.
They aren’t particularly pretty, they were published back when the internet and computers weren’t as robust as they are today. I imagine it was quite a chore to scan 6 books into PDF files.
Many thanks, Bill! Actually, I was unaware that those issues of Fine Tuning’s Proceedings were on CD.
I just purchased a CD via the ODXA website. It’s quite simple: simply send Harold Sellers a PayPal amount of $10 and he will ship the CD to you.
Instructions can be found on the ODXA website: simply click the FT Proceedings menu item.
Update: SWLing Post contributor, Jonathan Marks, adds:
There’s an interview with John Bryant of Fine tuning in this edition of Media Network:
http://jonathanmarks.libsyn.com/mn-18-08-1988-poland-and-radio-solidarity
[There are also] two other programmes with John Bryant which we did:
http://jonathanmarks.libsyn.com/mn-11-09-1995-turkish-police-radio-and-zenith-sw-radios covered the Zenith Transoceanic
and
http://jonathanmarks.libsyn.com/mn19091991-drake-r8 which went into some depth about the Drake R-8.
Links are broken. ODXA is no longer a viable club or resource. Web site gone
Hi Radio sparks, I was an editor and author for Fine Tuning’s Proceedings, and I started sharing a ZIP folder of all of the Proceedings’ content some years ago. More details on my Proceedings involvement is in another comment I posted below, in 2015.
Anyone is welcome to download these excellent articles:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/lhvu0zkezuy8txy/Proceedings.zip/file
If anyone would rather have the original paper copies, I have an complete set that I would like to sell (as of 08/25/2015). You can reach me at the e-mail on my Patepluma Radio website.
I was clicking the link to place my order within seconds of reading the post! The technical information is as valid and practical today as it was when first published. Anyone interested in radio propagation and DXing would be foolish to pass this up!
It’s great to see the venerable FT Proceedings editions still enjoyed by many after all these years. I had the pleasure to be on the editorial staff and I learned so much from the dedicated, advanced radio hobbyists who shared their knowledge in the pages of the books.
The book series was truly a labor of love for Proceedings’ head honcho John Bryant. I have fond memories of working beside him year after year at his Orcas Island, WA summer home, “pasting up” the next edition of the books. We struggled through the challenges of the desktop publishing “revolution”, dot matrix and laser printers, and graphics software running on over-burdened Windows 3.1 computers. We often worked in fits and starts, limited by outside resources (hmm… where can you find an Epson printer ribbon on a Sunday afternoon in Orcas Island? Nowhere! It’s a 3-hour round trip via ferry to the mainland and back :^)
These biennial publications went from ragged looking to fairly acceptable during the run of Proceedings, but the quality of the contributors and content was always first rate.
The long hours were worth the effort though, to help publish the widespread knowledge of advanced DXers and radio hobbyists in a lengthy format not constrained by the page count of the monthly hobby bulletins. This was John’s vision, and it’s satisfying to know that others are still enjoying and learning from FT’s Proceedings in 2015.
the stuff is very valuable and still relevant today. It will make you want to make new antennas and get an Icom R71
order was placed