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From: ron@brl-sem.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>)
Newsgroups: net.ham-radio
Subject: Re: Re: Orphaned Response
Message-ID: <532@brl-sem.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 16-Nov-85 02:36:50 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-sem.532
Posted: Sat Nov 16 02:36:50 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 17-Nov-85 07:19:16 EST
References: <19700019@hpfcmt.UUCP> <783500001@hpuslma.UUCP>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 27

> Aren't you being a little bit hard on the ARRL and their "commercialized maga-
> zine?"  I just received my Tech license recently and still enjoy seeing the 
> ads for the many new and different products on the marketplace.  Maybe we 
> should write to ARRL and request more technical articles, but at the same time
> I believe they have done a good job over the years promoting and protecting the
> rights and privileges of us Hams.  By the way I was WA0BNM back in the early
> '60's.
> 
It's just another BYTE.  Recent ARRL "protection" stands are about as
serving to the amateur community as Jerry Pournelle is to the advancement
of computer science (read the recent analysis of the need for auxiliary
operation below 220MHz).  We launched a letter writing campaign to QST
editors back in 1980 about the technical quality of the articles and even
suggest and volunteered to help with things like technical review of articles
and means for getting better technically qualified writers.  The answer,
which was even more galling than just inaction, was that they felt that
they were doing a superlative job.  Sure, that's why in the period of a
year we had an article on how to build a TouchTone decoder using 24 PLLs
(for those who don't know, there were chips to do that, albeit exensive...
$14.  But if you were going to do it with discreet PLL chips, you can
you only need seven (there are only seven tones) and an article on a
microcomputer application for blind amateurs that sent numbers to them
as a slow series of beeps.  Perhaps, some form of encoding (Morse?) would
be more appropriate.

Glad I didn't blow the bucks on a life membership.
-Ron