Very interesting, indeed. This probably accounts for the gradual shift (not
for the better) in QST technical articles over a number of years. There
seems to be more "publicity oriented" wording than precise technical content
compared to twenty or thirty years ago. I had assumed this was an
intentional effort to better address new hams, but I see it may have been
due to the editing process.

This editing problem is certainly not confined to QST. One of the few things
that sends my blood pressure to an astronomical level is for an editor to
make changes they do not understand. I depend on various font and
indentation settings for much of my material; now and then an editor will
decide to "standardize" these and I go completely off the wall.
Unfortunately, in many organizations the editors usually have the last shot
at material.

Bill - W2WO


"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
QST editors can't be expected to be experts on all the topics they have to
deal with. Over the years, they've dealt with the problem in various ways.
One was to establish a pool of "Technical Advisors" -- volunteers who had
particular expertise in various areas. Some manuscripts being considered
for publication were sent to the appropriate TAs for comments and review.
This practice slowly died out, but I don't know why. I suspect it was
because the editors seldom had the time for this step in the process due
to erratic scheduling.

Eventually, they adopted a solution which was easy on the editors and
their schedules: post the proposed articles to a restricted web site where
the TAs could review them and leave comments. This saved the time of
communicating with individual TAs, and made it unnecessary to wait for a
response -- if comments weren't there by the deadline, too bad. What I saw
as one problem with this approach was that comments and analyses were
regularly being made by TAs whose appointments had nothing at all to do
with the subject matter. As an example (not representing any actual
particular occurrence), a TA whose expertise was, say, legal matters or
publicity would review (for technical content) an article on phased
arrays. As far as I could tell, their reviews were weighted equally to
those from people who really understood the topic. In any case, the one or
few reviews from knowledgeable people were generally lost in the noise. I
don't know if this is the method still being used -- I resigned my TA
appointment several years ago when it became apparent that I was no longer
able to make any substantial contribution. I know of at least a couple of
very knowledgeable people who have done likewise. This is a shame, because
they're perfectly willing to provide free technical assistance, yet the
ARRL doesn't seem able to find a way to take advantage of it.

I'm not sure they've ever solved the problem of editors who don't
understand the material modifying it in such a way as to make it no longer
true. In all cases but one when this happened to me, I was able to correct
the problems before publication. In one case, however, I wasn't given
enough time to correct the numerous misinterpretations, invalid
"explanations", and other seriously wrong modifications made by the editor
and had to pull the article(*). Several extremely capable people I know,
however, have had serious errors introduced to their articles by the
editor *after their final review*, so they didn't even get to see the
errors until the article was published under their name. Most of these
people will never write for QST again as a result. This is one of the
reasons that QST has a smaller pool of knowledgeable and capable authors
to draw from.

So when you see a technically weak article in QST, the author might not be
entirely at fault.

(*) I want to make it clear that I'm very aware that my writing and
communicating skills aren't all that great, and I really appreciate having
an editor improve the style, clarity, and brevity of my writing, as well
as questioning any weak or inconsistent arguments I've made. [A good
editor would have cut half the words from the preceding sentence, and made
it a lot clearer at the same time.] So I welcome editing. What I do object
to is editing which changes the core meaning of the content and/or results
in its being technically incorrect.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL