Ham Radio Online - Author Guidelines

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Copyright © 1995-2002 by Edward Mitchell

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Author Guidelines For Ham Radio Online

We welcome article submissions, news reports, suggestions, suggestions for links to other online articles, and press releases! If you have any questions, please review these guidelines. You can mail your articles or press releases direct to us at kf7vy@amsat.org.

About Ham Radio Online

Ham Radio Online is a self-funded, personal web site presented as an "online electronic magazine". Its primary focus is the world of amateur radio telecommunications, but also presents stories about many aspects of telecommunications including new technology developments and the radio sciences.

In spite of our professional appearance, Ham Radio Online is a personal web site, not a commercial undertaking. This means:

1. We publish what we want to publish and we owe you no obligations.
2. Ham Radio Online is published as a hobby – that means we update the web site after other responsibilities in life are taken care of first. This means it can take some time before we are able to incorporate your suggestions and articles.
3. We do not accept advertising – sorry. For a variety of reasons, we have chosen not to sell ad space. At our discretion, we have occasionally had small "ads" for such things at the SeaPac Ham Radio Convention – which we added on our own because we enjoy visiting SeaPac. We also occasionally print press releases.
4. We cannot guarantee a personal answer for each email – sometimes we get as many as 40 emails per day!

How To Submit a Feature Story, Press Release or Article Suggestion

If you have an idea for a story, just send us an email at kf7vy@amsat.org. We publish articles on a wide variety of topics ranging from technical – electronics, science, radio theory, new technologies including computer networking and cellular phone systems, space exploration, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to less technical topics like general news or the history of radio.

If you have a story, just mail it to us at kf7vy@amsat.org. We do ask that you have the right to send us the article – we cannot publish an article that you already had published at another magazine under their copyright. We do our best to not violate copyright rules.

Kindly note - we do not pay for articles, obviously, since we do not carry advertising nor do we have anything to sell.

Press releases - If you are a commercial organization, we will consider printing your press release if we think the topic has widespread interest. For example, we linked to a press release put out by Motorola on the "Software architecture" radios they are building for the U.S. military. Another alternative is to write an informative article that has some broad appeal, and also mentions your product. A great example of this style is "Ham Radio Holidays at Fox Mountain Lodge" (see http://hamradio-online.com/1996/mar/foxlodge.html). We are more likely to publish this type of article than we are to publish a press release. Since we run Ham Radio Online as a hobby, it is not our interest to do a lot of layout work to increase your profits! However, to the extent that your interest meets our interests of promoting Amateur Radio and an interest in telecommunications, we are interested your press releases and stories! We do not have hard and fast rules as to whether or not we will print a particular press release – best bet is to send it to us and we will look it over.

File Formats

Microsoft Word is preferred but we can read many other file formats, as needed. You can also send us files as text files or as HTML files. Pictures should be sent as JPEG (.jpg) or GIF (.gif) files, preferred, although we can convert as required. PLEASE do not send us huge bitmap (.bmp) files – or huge files of any type, for that matter. We have to download files over a telephone modem like everyone else.

Calendar Requests

Please send announcements for the online calendar to kf7vy@amsat.org. Please provide as much lead time as possible as we are not always able to update this section as often as we would like.

Adding Web Sites to the Other Sites List

Currently, we update the popular Other Sites list about 4 to 6 times per year. Due to the quantity of requests that we receive, we ask that you send the URL, the site name, and a brief description. When you send us a link request, we add it to the "to do" list and rarely send a personal reply. When we do our periodic update every 2 or 3 months, we will add your web site to the online list.

Adding Web Sites to the Commercial Products Directory

Adding updates to this section is the same as the "Other Sites List", just described.