Sunday, Oct. 2, 2011 — If there was a college major that involved being a ham radio historian, I would be the first student to sign up. I tend to enjoy the QSTs and other radio-related magazines of the past 90 years more than I do the current editions; perhaps it serves as proof that with age, comes insanity.
These days I’ve been perusing my QST CDs, though I don’t use the crappy software that the ARRL packaged with the CDs; I have found that Adobe Bridge (a file browser packaged with Photoshop CS4 and other Adobe products) is a much better method of viewing the files on CD.
At right is a Collins ad in the April 1959 QST magazine, touting the nice, neat compact station the Collins gear can make — and look at the OM’s operating position! Who could argue with that claim? But what a fantasy — not only to have a new Collins station, but to have it in your den and have it look that nice and neat! Check out the shine on that floor, too — the XYL’s been working overtime with the floor polisher. I won ‘t begin to wonder where the OM keeps his soldering iron, junk box and his latest project rig. Where are the QSL cards?
If I was the ad copywriter, I would have followed this ad up with one depicting the OM’s shack in the garage or basement — I’m sure its more of the usual shack-like mess we’re all accustomed to as hams!
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I’ve enjoyed going through my QST CDs a lot, obviously! The QST CDs contain PDF scans of the pages of the back issue of the magazine. The scans are of very low quality; but that’s partly because they were trying to get as many pages on each CD as they could. Color and higher resolution would have eaten up valuable disk space.
The CDs were firsted publish in the late-1990s, not long after Windows 95 was released; my impression is that they were not good sellers; a full set was expensive, and an individual decade (or 5 year CD set on later decades) was $39.95. They lasted a few years on the ARRL catalog and by 2006 were slated for being discontinued (though interestingly, they never discounted the CD sets!).
One of the issues I think they were having was compatibility with the file readers; as faster processors arrived, the AView software on newer operating systems got a little buggy. Some of the early version of AView won’t even operate on my Windows Vista machine.
I bought several sets of the QST CDs with the intent of getting them all, but many of the sets were sold out before I could buy a copy. I eventually bought the missing sets in an eBay auction. If you have a set to sell, I would be interested in a second set to archive.
The ARRL has made the archive of QSTs available via its website; the only problem I have with it is that it doesn’t allow you to call up an individual page; you have to search and find something by its name, call or terminology. You wind up missing full page ads, for example. I’ll have to check the archive again, but that’s how it worked the last time I visited.
Enough history, I need to get ready for a little road trip!