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 his year has been one of consolidation of the sPARC gap into a more organic whole. The makeup of the newsletter has the repetitive stuff placed on the same pages from month to month, greatly simplifying the setup of each issue. For the most part, we are getting sufficient copy each month to fill it out, although it sometimes trickles in horribly late.
We have added one new advertiser to the group of businesses supporting the club and the news-letter. Cascade Surplus came on board in October, with its 1/3 page ad. With the printing donated anonymously,
the sPARC gap is a lot closer to self-sufficiency now than it has been in years. Too bad we can't get the postage donated!
It has also prompted occasional correspondence from Ron Mayer, K7BT, with whom I created the newsletter, 21 years ago. Mostly his contributions have been to point out typographical errors, some of them chronic, that occasion-ally escape more local eyes. It's good to hear from him again, after he rain-birded out of Portland a couple of years ago to a new home in Kona, Hawaii. Now, if he might only get some sort of HF antenna up before he turns 80 in March, we'll have something!
As for
the sPARC gap in general, we're getting rave reviews from ARRL staffers and bigwigs who get to see it when they come out here for
SeaPAC. There have been times in the past (mostly under my stewardship) that we've gotten similar raves, but there have been other times that things have declined. That is to be expected. I don't intend to keep this up for-ever, nor should anyone else. Special recognition is due Ed
Burress, KC7GFX for making the sPARC gap a color publication. Every Editor is going to have a different conception of how it should look; and some will fare better than others.
My own on-air activities have suffered over the past couple of years, as I have gotten back into the local music scene. At one time (more than 20 years ago), I was able to support myself on the basis of my work playing and writing music. That has always been my vocation, but it's had to take a back seat to paying the bills. Since my day job got exported overseas by the corporate entity that used to employ me, I've been looking for replacement work. So far, every job opening I've seen for which I'm qualified is being offered at a lower rate than I'm currently collecting on Unemployment. They've also had typically over a thousand applicants, each.
So, where do we go from here? I am looking for an understudy (preferably not a current officer of the club) to train as my eventual replacement. I've got it down now to where, with the inflow of copy from various sources, it takes about half a day to clean up the submitted copy and apply format standards that I've imposed, and to drop the pictures in place. That's a lot better than the couple of working days it used to take me. We need a more current banner across the top of the page (we've been in our 61st year since 2001, but the banner hasn't changed. Perhaps deleting that piece from it??? Serving the Portland community since 1941 covers that by itself).
-AL7W
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