[Boatanchors] A Classic Example of the Homebrew Art

[Richard Knoppow]

    You bring up a very good point. One thing I noticed is that 
much of the QST stuff was very crowded. Looked impossible to 
build that way. I wondered why the gear shown was so consistently 
that way.
    My mentor, W6VX, published several construction articles in 
QST. He was a pro as far as construction and the stuff 
illustrated was the actual gear but comparing CQ with QST shows 
the difference in both construction and quality of the 
photography. A lot of QST articles were also for impossibly 
elaborate equipment, all band double conversion receivers. No one 
I knew had the facilities or test instruments to build anything 
like that. It made me wonder sometimes who was willing to do all 
that work for publication.
    It was also only after many years that I realized that 
articles in "professional" technical magazines (as opposed to 
peer reviewed journals) were often written by engineers looking 
for work or promotion.

On 9/27/2020 12:46 PM, Rob Atkinson wrote:
> That's a beautiful piece of work but remember that for QST, most of
> the time authors submitted their text and schematics, and the
> professional shop techs and machinists at ARRL built the piece of gear
> that readers saw in QST photos.  That's why all the homebrew in QST
> was always perfect looking.   It was the ham equivalent of these House
> Beautiful magazines that show these gorgeous interiors that look like
> no one has ever lived in them.
>
> When I was a new ham in high school I knew none of this and since the
> QST staff never widely admitted the article gear was built by them in
> a well equipped machine shop, that meant that for me, homebrew was
> this impossibly high bar as I naively thought ALL those projects were
> built by the authors, therefore all ham homebrew looked perfect and if
> you were going to build something and you couldn't turn out a
> perfectly laid out and punched chassis and front panel, then forget
> about it.
>
> It wasn't until years later as an adult that I started throwing parts
> together and getting stuff to work and the hell with how it looks.
>
> I  wonder how many hams never tried to build anything because they
> never thought they could achieve the QST build quality.
>
> 73
>
> Rob
> K5UJ
>
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 2:21 PM Al Klase <ark at ar88.net> wrote:
>> Gang,
>>
>> I've been obsessing over an artifact from 1951 QST, *Take a look*
>> <http://www.skywaves.ar88.net/homebrew/Homebrew_Projects.htm>.
>>
>> Al
>>
>> --
>> Al Klase – N3FRQ
>> Jersey City, NJ
>> http://www.skywaves.ar88.net/
>>
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-- 
Richard Knoppow
1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com
WB6KBL