At 06:00 AM 8/9/2007, Richard Smith wrote:
>Lyle, you make an excellent point. But, you also make my point. When the
>ARRL wants to review a QRP rig, they go to a QRP expert. They should do the
>same thing when it comes to SDR - go to an SDR expert, or at the very least
>someone who has some SDR experience. (I think the QRP aspect of the rig is
>secondary to the SDR aspect).
>
>I never meant to disparage Rich in my comments, and I agree with you about
>him being a great guy in the QRP world. We need many more like him. I just
>think he was the wrong person to go to for an SDR review. We all
>acknowledge that SDR has a learning curve, but why does the ARRL choose to
>review an SDR rig by someone who is clearly at the beginning of that curve?
>Wouldn't it have made more sense to find a "typical ham" with at least some
>SDR experience so that the reviewer could cut to the chase about the quality
>of the rig, rather than focus on the frustrations of learning SDR?
My impression of how ARRL gets its material is more from volunteers
than from some omniscient editorial board carefully evaluating and
selecting the person. Might well be that the reviewer was interested
in the thing (being a QRP SDR) and volunteered to write the review
(or pitched the article), and the editors said, yep, we've got a hole
to fill, have at it.
There might be some informal ties at work too.. The ham radio world,
particularly the part which is willing and able to write articles, is
quite small, and everyone knows or knows of all the other
folks. They may be on the same email lists, or go to the same
conferences, or work the same contests. So, if the editor is
thinking, hey we need a reviewer for this, there will be several
people who pop into mind. {I might point out that almost exactly the
same mechanism works in the professional journal world... at a
certain point, in a narrow enough field, you KNOW all the other
people working on it. I could probably make a list of the dozen or
so engineers world wide who design and work on deep space
transponders.. it's just not that big a field, and there's only half
a dozen places that do that kind of work.}
Jim, W6RMK
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