An Explanation

When I started as a Novice Ham back in June of 1992 I wanted a way to keep all the wonderful articles I came across for possible use some time later.

I soon realized that the old way of doing this, either cutting the pages out of the magazines or photo copying them, would so over load the file cabinet I had, which already had numerous electronics & physics articles in it, that I'd soon need another cabinet.

At the time I was working at NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly the NBS. NIST it turned out had almost every QST magazine ever printed so I didn't need my own library of QSTs I just needed a way to know which magazine had which article.

Times change and I moved on, times changed again and I found a way to set up this web site on a free server qsl.net. After spending some time learning & playing with JavaScript I figured out a way to not only list the articles but also be able to search them.

At that point I uploaded all the data to the web site along with the JavaScript search engine.

Times continue to change & I moved to a different server where space was offered to me because of helping with the owner's JavaScript book. I found this server much faster so this particular application worked better. It also allowed me to write PHP & Perl applications if needed. I could write on-line sign-up forms for the VE sessions & I wrote membership forms for the Carroll County ARES/RACES group.
Times continue to change and in 2009 - 2010 I found that I had far less time than before and I'd gotten almost a year behind in putting articles up on my web site. Thankfully that has changed once again and I am presently caught up & hope to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately time never stops and now the ARRL at least has all of their QST magazines up on their web site and they also have a way to search for relevant articles. This means that my way of doing things is no longer needed for ARRL members, including myself. I hope to be able to keep up with this task from time to time but obviously not as quickly as I used to.

I know this has been a great help to some of you from time to time, and I thank you for letting me know. It sure has been a help to me because my lists are only of the articles I have an interest in & believe that I may one day want to try something contained therein.

Last, all good things must come to an end... As of today 6/1-/2022 I have decided that I no longer have enough interest at age 71 to keep this list up-to-date. As of today I finally added December 2021 to this "database" really a simple HTML text-file that can be searched.

So, as of the December 2021 issue I will no longer be adding to this "Database" of QST articles. Since this was originally done for my use and I find I've used this list only rarely, so, I've decided to stop with the QST December 2021 issue. 73 de ke3fl,
Phil Karras       [ Return to the KE3FL Home Page ]
May 18, 2010