[TowerTalk] TowerTalk is old enough to drink!

[jimlux]

On 6/26/19 11:01 AM, Jim Brown wrote:
> On 6/26/2019 10:39 AM, chuck.gooden wrote:
>> It would be nice if someone could review all of the postings and 
>> condense it down to a book.
> 
> Not exactly that, but Steve, being a tower pro, did write a great book 
> on the topic, to which I contributed a chapter on grounding and bonding. 
> Steve also partnered with N0AX on two excellent studies of HF tribanders 
> and HF verticals. They are monumental work. Buy them here! 
> https://www.championradio.com/
> 

And that's the operative word.. "buy"


It's an enormous amount of work to write and edit a book, and short of 
doing it as a labor of love, one would need to be paid.  How much would 
the average TTer be willing to fork out for a book like that, and how 
many TTers would actually sign up to buy it?

And even then... I suspect that Steve and Ward are not retiring to their 
private islands on the proceeds of sales of the antenna studies. (Which 
are great... I bought at least one, maybe both.. it was long ago)

I've contributed to the ARRL handbook, and I've got a few other book 
chapters professionally.  Conservatively, I'd say doing this kind of 
thing is about 5-10 work hours/page (I am, I confess, typing this as a 
break from writing something else for work). That's the time to get your 
info together, organize it, get the drafts written, generate rough 
drawings for someone else to make pretty, do the revisions, proofread, 
and do the production.

That makes a 100 page book about 6 month's full time work - if you 
wanted to be paid $50/hr (which is at the low end for a technical 
professional, esp without benefits), that's $50k - you'd have to sell 
thousands of copies to make it "worthwhile" in a financial sense (if you 
self publish, you might get $5 or $10/copy)


And let's not forget that today, you may have a great book, but copying 
is easy.  So you're better off not trying to make money from the book, 
but rather, doing it because you want to share knowledge. Hopefully, you 
have another way to keep yourself fed and housed, and in the ideal 
situation, part of that job is to write the book.
This is why most technical books are written by people who have a "day 
job" for which book writing is "part of the job", or as noted above, as 
a labor of love.

For instance, Sophocles Orfanidis has a great antenna textbook, online, 
free: http://eceweb1.rutgers.edu/~orfanidi/ewa/
but he's a professor at Rutgers and that's his "day job".
(and he has a fairly useful set of matlab/octave routines with the book)

(I like Kraus's "Antennas" better, but Orfanidis's is available as a 
pdf, so it's easier to keep around)


Jim W6RMK