Old Magazines
As part of a downsizing exercise I'm trying to clean out my shed of most of the QST magazines I have collected over the past 15 years. I was hoping to buy all the QSTs on CD from perhaps 1950 or 1960 to present to replace the paper copies and get several more decades to peruse when I'm an old codger vegetating in one of those assisted dying homes. I figured ARRL would offer the whole kit and kaboodle for perhaps $150 or $200. Going to the website I was dismayed to learn to get just 1995 to present would cost $310. OK, maybe I was a bit unrealistic, but how much does it cost to have an intern burn CDs from the already existing QST PDF database? Looks like I'll continue to have a couple hundred pounds of magazines in my shed for the foreseeable future. Oh well. If I ever lose my job I can use them to heat the house.
Anthony Good, K3NG, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Pennsylvania, USA. Contact him at anthony.good@gmail.com.I also have a bunch of 73 magazines. No chance of ever getting them CD. NEVER SAY DIE! Not. What CQ magazines I had left I tossed out. I always thought it was a somewhat quirky publication, though I was a 73 fan at the time, so perhaps it was just me that was quirky.
I also found several years of Popular Communications from the 1980s. I loved this magazine when I was a teenager. I was a big pirate radio fan at the time and really enjoyed the spy stories. I almost threw the box out but decided to keep it. It's a window back into a time that we'll never see again when shortwave broadcasting was actually interesting.