Sunday, Aug. 21, 2011 — I don’t know if I ever mentioned it, but sometime back I purchased the remaining QST CDs off eBay to complete my collection — from the first issue in 1914 through 1999. Now, of course, I’m going to look for the subsequent periodicals on CD, but I haven’t yet taken up that task.
The League discontinued the CDs a couple of years ago, though I’m not sure why. One of the problems was the viewing software that they had was less than optimum, and it allegedly wouldn’t run (or run well) on some later versions of the Windows OS. It has run fine on Windows Vista, and if software runs on Vista, it’ll run on just about anything!
Actually, there’s a couple of viewers that were packaged with the CDs. The first one isn’t very compatible with newer OS versions; I had trouble with it. But a later version called AView works fine. However, I have a better way of viewing the files — I use Photoshop.
I have Photoshop CS4 and I use the Adobe Bridge to browse the files on CD (Photoshop version 7.0 and later had a “file browser” feature as well). It shows a thumbnail of each page, and I can quickly scroll through the pages this way, opening the ones I want.
My issue with the QST CDs is the scan quality of the images; the quality — in today’s standards — is pretty crappy. Today’s compression schemes could take the file and reduce it in size and provide excellent quality. The CDs are a good archive, but the images are pretty icky, which is sad considering all the time it would take to rescan the pages (do they need a volunteer to do it again??).
The League made it unnecessary to buy the CDs when they decided to make the file library available to members at no charge — quite a nice bonus for membership if you enjoy reading the old issues as much as I. But the ARRL’s web-based QST archive is less than perfect.
For example, I was researching the men (and women) who have served as SCM and SM of Kentucky. Using the online archive, I was unable to call up the page with the SMs on it because there was no way that I could find to search for that page (it had no article on it or other search parameter that would allow you to find it). As far as I could tell, I could not find a way to simply call up “page 4” in a particular issue of QST. Maybe I should contact HQ and ask, there may be a way to do that.
The image quality online and on the CD are the same. I have a sizable collection of QSTs from the 1920s through the 1950s … if it wouldn’t destroy the magazine binding I would scan the pages over time, simply to build a better, higher quality archive. From my visit to HQ, it seems to me that they have the pages in volumes with removable pages, but I may be wrong. Maybe I could be a summer intern one year and visit HQ long enough to scan a bunch of QST pages …. or better yet, how about they ship me portions of the collection and I set up a scanning station to do this quickly?
KEY INTEREST IN OLD QST MAGS. As you might expect, one of my favorite parts of QSTs are the advertisements for equipment and code keys. Not all code keys were well advertised, so you have to look closely. It’s funny to see how inexpensive military surplus straight keys were after World War II.
Vibroplex was a constant advertiser after the war for many years; Speed-X ads showed up from time to time, and frequently after E.F. Johnson bought the company and rebranded them. Keys also show up in the ham retail ads too.
At one time I was reading all of the stories that came up in QST regarding electronic keyers, which were first discussed widely in the magazine in the late 1930s. I believe the Mon-Key was the first production automatic electronic key, but there were several keyers developed about that time as well. Might make an interesting article, though only a cw key geek like me would give a rat’s about it, hi hi!
LIGHTNING STRIKES? Time to put my 1978 Vibroplex Lightning Bug on the air … signing off for now …. SK