Dear all,
I don't know about RSGB and RadCom but I am closely involved in UBA
and it's magazine (CQ-QSO).
There are probably as many opinions about the contents of a magazine
as there are readers. So a good editor should try to keep the balance
between all those interests.
For CQ-QSO the "mix" is more or less 1/3 UBA affairs (informing
members), 1/3 non technical stuff (DX-pedition reports and other "easy
reading") and 1/3 technical stuff. Even within the technical stuff a
balance has to be found between various topics and levels. Not easy at
all ...
But the main problem to maintain this "mix" is the input of articles.
The UBA affairs part is more or less produced automatically (as the
output from discussions, meetings etc.). Further we receive plenty of
"easy reading" stuff, so no problem to fill that part. But it is an
endless struggle to get good technical articles. And no input = no
output ;-)
As said, I don' know about RSGB and RadCom, but I wouldn't be
surprised if the situation is similar.
So maybe everyone who feels that there must be more technical articles
should think about writing one ?
A simple "math exercise" we once did:
- CQ-QSO is a bi-mothly magazine and has 44 pages = 264 pages/year
- UBA has about 3000 members
So if every member would write a 1 page tech article every 10 year we
could fill our magazine from the first to the last page with tech
artciles.
Being more realistic: assuming that
- 10% of our members (= 300) is technical involved
- we want to fill 1/3 of the magazine (= 88 pages/year) with tech stuff
- the average tech article is 3 pages (= 30 articles/year)
Again it comes one 1 tech article (per technical involved meber) every
10 years
Sounds so easy .. but is so hard.
73, Rik ON7YD
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