Amateur Radio Magazines

[Kevin2960]

I am a very keen Radio Amateur, Licenced here in the UK as G1GEV and I love reading Amateur (Ham) Radio Magzines, I have not found any of the bigger publications as eBooks, I believe there are some in PDF but these aren't best quality magazines,

Therefore does anyone know of Good Ham Mags to read on my Sony PRS-600 ? Other stuff such as Ham books also would be appreciated, especially cheap or better still FREE,

Any Links much appreciated,




73

[jasonfedelem]

Interesting question, I have not looked myself but will look tomorrow maybe. I'm thinking that ARRL might have an RSS feed that can be plugged into Calibre.

KQ6UX/5

[Kevin2960]

Originally Posted by jasonfedelem

Interesting question, I have not looked myself but will look tomorrow maybe. I'm thinking that ARRL might have an RSS feed that can be plugged into Calibre.

KQ6UX/5

Thanks Jason as far as I know ARRL do nothing but maybe we can campaign to get the RSGB and ARRL to publish Magazines electronicly

Thanks Again

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Getting them to publish in an electronic format would be ideal but for now, scanning paper magazines is an option although a larger reader would be necessary to be able to read them. I'm doing that with my magazines. Since they are Tech type magazines, I'll read them only on my computer anyway.

[jasonfedelem]

Lady,

Don't you find that the time it takes to scan the magazine negates the benefit of having it on the reader?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by jasonfedelem

Lady,

Don't you find that the time it takes to scan the magazine negates the benefit of having it on the reader?

The time it takes me to scan a magazine is minimal; about a minute to cut off the spine, one or two minutes to scan it in a duplexing ADF scanner (Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500) and another 30 minutes to an hour to run it through OCR (the latter can run unattended while I do something else). I only run the magazines (not books) I scan through OCR because of the time required and because I want the magazines to be searchable (something I won't need for most books) so it isn't necessary for me to edit the results of OCR (the setting I use is for making searchable PDFs; I still view the original scan). The biggest savings for me comes from the space savings since I will not have to store the physical magazines anymore (for me, this one is HUGE since I plan to move into a travel trailer in a year or two). A secondary benefit is it is faster to search my "e-magazines" for articles on a certain subject than to dig through a huge collection of paper magazines, especially since not every little tip is listed in the TOC. "Bookmarks" are also easier to maintain and search.

[jasonfedelem]

Well if you have stack feed OCR I can see that. I wonder if my scanner will do that? I'll have to check.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Once all the magazine pages have been scanned (I usually can fit the entire magazine in at once), I set my scanner to save the scans as a single, searchable PDF then just walk away from it for a while the OCR does its thing. Magazines average 100 pages and have less text then most books with 100 pages so the time necessary runs about 1/2 to one hour. My scanner used ABBY Finereader for the OCR and Adobe Acrobat to make the PDFs (both included with the scanner). I get only half a dozen magazines a month so the time involved isn't that bad, especially if I do only one a day.