[time-nuts] The VE2ZAZ GPSDO

Tim Shoppa shoppa at trailing-edge.com
Sat Oct 21 19:52:10 EDT 2006


shoppa at trailing-edge.com (Tim Shoppa) wrote:
> Having seen some bad vibes unfold through the channels of the
> letters column and other communications with editors, I think that
> BY FAR the most useful thing to do would be to contribute an
> improvement (preferably with schematic) rather than a lengthy
> textual or mathematical criticism.

To elaborate a little bit:

Writing for a magazine is not something anyone will ever make
money at. It's about as profitable as sitting around all day
posting to Usenet and mailing lists :-).

Editors typically chose articles based not on technical merit
compared to commercial products or state-of-the-art lab merits
but instead on FIRST on how it looks to sell the magazine and
then secondarily on reproducibility/constructibility. The order
is actually often reversed by the best of the ARRL editors, to
their credit.

I ghost-authored some articles for hobbyist electronics magazines
in the 80's. It was a memorable experience. It had little to do with
academic knowledge or product superiority and everything with
shine and pizazz. It seriously soured me on salesmanship - I can
literally get disgusted when I see the techniques used to push
a crappy product in a sales presentation etc. In some ways
I wish I could recover the naivete of my youth and be the
"happy wanderer" that buy all the crap being sold out there!

Tim.



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