Michael Black wrote:
art ) writes:

Pat Hawker was the only part that I read but lately he seems to be
rambling.


I'm rather surprised that he's still doing the column. It's been
thirty years since I bought a collection of Technical Topics, and later
I found a used one dating from the sixties. I have no idea when
he started doing it (wait, I guess if this is "50 years of antenna topics"
then it must be fifty years), but I suspect nobody has had such a long
running column in the ham magazines.

Of course, such columns are relatively easy to write, since it's a filtering
of a lot of material down to it's essence.



Actually, such columns can be very difficult to write. Distilling to
the essence, without losing an essential detail, can be quite
challenging. Anyone can write a 200 page tome that covers something in
all its gory detail, given sufficient time and effort. It's
substantially harder to make an adequate summary in 100 words, and doing
it on a deadline.

Sort of like writing meaningful abstracts for a technical paper.