Welcome to Handiham World.
What you don't see
Blind? What do you miss in special-format publications designed for blind readers?
In this edition of your weekly Handiham World we are taking some time to review a part of some of the amateur radio magazines that many of our members are never able to access. Sure, you can read articles when they are made available in DAISY from the Library of Congress National Library Service, and that is a wonderful service indeed. In fact, when the December magazines come out, there is no way for our members to know what might be showing up in the display advertising. Postal regulations do not allow free matter content to include any advertisements, only articles. This leaves our members with a somewhat incomplete experience. I'm basing my conclusion about this on the fact that I and most everyone else I know spend plenty of time looking at the display ads to see what is new in Amateur Radio technology and services. You can't always depend upon any publication to review new radio equipment at the same time that it is first being offered to the public via display advertisements. If you have ever had the experience of talking on the air or at a radio club meeting with your fellow ham radio operators and being surprised to hear about some innovative new technology, you can get a feeling for what we are talking about here. If you depend on NLS DAISY downloads or cartridges, you will have no idea what is going on in display advertising within any of the usual Amateur Radio publications unless someone who can see the display ads fills you in.Now, I want to make it clear that we don't take any advertising ourselves nor does this edition of your Handiham World contain any ads. What I am going to do is simply look through the December QST and the November CQ and produce a short narrative of what I am seeing that seems worthy of mentioning. It is up to you to figure out how to access any manufacturer's website or your favorite ham radio dealer if you want to find out more, since we don't sell anything ourselves and heaven knows we are not "tech support" for every radio, gadget, and service that you might find out about in these publications. What I hope to do is give you an idea what is going on in a somewhat general way so that you can follow up on the things that catch your interest.
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