Gift to

May 1963
de W2NSD
lo"• • " ..y dl .
No ti ce to ARR L Mem bers
It is now obvious th at QST i~ going to keep
heating the drum s for their buHding fund until
you all pay up. If you 'd send in the money
th en QST could get back to their detailed
opera ting news rep orts. Afte r all, Egypt h as its
pyra mids and China ha s its wall, so why
should n't we hav e OUf ARRL Skyscraper? Get
with it fellows; you joined the AR RL , now
suppo rt it in its time of crisis. or course th is
won', stop you from needling them a bi t by
marking your check ou t 10 the ARRL BUI LD ­
I ~ C: F U:'\D (73 W IXG ) . Send it to ARRL,
W f>st H artford I . Conn. Save just a litt le
in ca se we ge t too jealous of the new budding
and ha ve to have a sha nrv fun d for i3
(we'd nev er be ab le to get enou gh for a
hnil:lillg:) .
73 Pa rts Kits
:',Iy introduction of parts kits for ou r
simpler construction pr ojects back in March
brought on mixed reacti ons. The readers wr ote
in cc mplimentmg us on th e move . Some even
wen t so far as to order kits, though not many.
Rememberi ng how long it took the Bookshop
to build up steady ord ers I was en couraged
th at even tw enty kits should be ordered the
first mont h .
CQ. in an attempt to hu rt us w ith the parts
d istri butors, wher e my latest figu res show we
are outselling CQ by better than two to one ,
sent out a letter viewin g th e 73 kits wit h
gr eat alarm and wo rrying that we might
shortly put parts di stributors out of bu siness.
Thou gh their intent was unfriendly , th e resu lt
was very helpful for CQ 's hysteria made m any
parts distributors awa re of our kits and the y
were thus more disposed to go a long with l IS
on handling th e pa rts kits through th eir com ­
pan ies.
It was ob vious fr om the first we would
not be abl e to finan ce more than a short test
of th e kit idea . You see, kee ping our subscrip ­
tion rate s an d adv ertising rates ve ry low keep
us from makin g any money, so if somethi ng
costs m ore than a few hundred dollars we have
to forget it . The kit program won't make any
money for anyone for a long time and I doub t
if I could have convinced many parts distribut
ors (or an y) to pa rticipate without CQ's
attac k.
Now that we are ge tt ing better organized
\...-ith the kits we will be looking in to our b ack
issues for good kit pro jects and will try to
work up a good comp rehensive kit list for
you to sel ect from.
A pr il
Cover
Old timers probably got a kick ou t of our
April F ool cover last mont h. I am happy to
repo rt that th e HQ gang seemed to enjoy it
. . . see, they're not as stuffy as you thought .
I did con sider do ing a p arody of CQ , but
cou ldn 't thi nk of an ything fun nier than the)'
have now so tu rned my at ten tion to QST.
Smal l Issue
\ Ve had plan ned upon running 128 pages
agai n this mon th . bu t several factors interfered.
f or one thing the cost of ru nni ng the 128 pages
last mon th was considerably higher than had
bee n est ima ted . Then 1 was laid low by a
cold at advertiser harassment tim e and d idn't
get qui te as many ads this month as I could
have . And finally, Virgin ia. who does most of
the work around here, had to tak e a cou ple
of d ays o ff to h ave a baby . Next mont h we 're
goi ng to ha ve a really b ig issue, so wait it out.
(It's a gtrl.)
( m oro n 4 )
13 MACAZINE
73 Magazine · Octo ber, 1980 153