At 04:47 PM 4/2/2007, WA3GIN in Alex. City, VA wrote:
>It's not a lie...it is just not the entire story. If you few folks are so
>bent out of shape maybe should stop your whining and write a short paragraph
>that tells the rest of it and mail it to QST.
And it may, or may not, be published or even acknowledged: There is,
after all, a space limit for Technical Correspondence and Feedback,
too. Typically, QST just forwards your comments to the original
author (or worse yet, just gives you the author's email address and
lets you do the forwarding), who may or may not respond as they see
fit. After all, they're mostly volunteers, and it's not like someone
is paying them to respond.
If they do decide to publish your comments, it's unlikely that
someone down the road will know it's there. In the scientific
journals, you'll see comments referring to a paper separately
published and indexed, so if you use a search engine, you'll turn up
both the original paper and the comments. And, I've even seen old
archival IEEE conference proceedings with hand annotations on the
page images: See later paper by XYZ on X June 19XX, but that was
probably a fortuitous circumstance that the copy they scanned
happened to have been annotated by someone. Furthermore, the
expectation of the typical journal is such that authors have a
responsibility to respond, and pay for it as well (not only did you
pay page charges for the original paper, but you pay page charges for
the correspondence too!). But, that's the difference between the
"scientific literature" and "general readership".
In any case, since QST isn't indexed on any of the search engines,
and the contents of "errata" and "user feedback" isn't in the tables
of contents(they're just regular features), a correction or
clarification is essentially invisible, unless you are really a
scholar looking for such things.
(note that ARRL's search engine finds the original article, but not
any corrections. Case in point, since I'm cleaning out a shelf, I
found a Feedback correcting an error in the Aug 2000 issue for an
article that was published in the July 2000 issue. The original
article is indexed, but not the correction)
>There are so many anal retentive experts on this reflector who know so much
>and have so much time to flame each other on the reflector, why not take
>your energy where you claim it is needed and get your excellence published
>in QST so you can save all us lost radio souls that have worked 300
>countries on verticals with no radials...
Well... that's precisely the problem that QST faces... it takes but a
few minutes to dash off a comment on TT (and for which it's an
appropriate venue), but some serious multihour work over a number of
weeks to write a decent article.
In this modern era, that's sort of the tradeoff... TT (and online
forums of it's ilk) replaces the sitting around at the weekly bull
session kinds of discussions, without the need for instantaneous
response or to actually be on the air at the same time (like you
would for a net). And there are venues for detailed, well reviewed
work (books, journals). What's kind of getting lost in the shuffle
is the intermediate level somewhere between the talking shop (which
is what TT is, for all intents and purposes) and peer-reviewed
journals of record.
I'm not sure what the "general readership" answer is, to be
honest. Online antenna handbook or wikipedia might be nice, because
then you wouldn't have the "but my copy of the handbook from 1965
says X" kinds of problems. And, it would have sufficient room to
grow to accomodate the very interesting background information that
crops up (e.g. why lots of radials are important to broadcast
directional arrays) and is oh so essential for interpreting the raw
recommendation or guidance (e.g. 120 or 60 radials of length
y). That background information necessarily gets left out in a book
(too expensive to include it all, much less edit it) or in a short
article (except where it's actually the subject of the article).
I have this problem at work.. we'll have some requirement for a
system: "The system shall do X" which has been part of specs for
decades and the reason for it has been lost in the mists of history,
and might not even be relevant anymore, but nobody is willing to
figure out why it's still there. "Oh, just leave it in, it's easier
to do that than explain why we got rid of it at the next design
review. At least it does no harm". For all we know, it was
originally created to deal with some peculiarity of the materials
that were available in 1960.
But even then, someone has to write the material, edit the material,
and manage the online presence, and that's a lot of work too, even if
many hands do make light(er) work. Just saying "let's have an
antenna wiki" is a long, long ways from it being useful. N6BV puts
in a LOT of hours editing and revising the antenna book, and it's
mostly the same from edition to edition.
Jim, W6RMK
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
|