As I’ve mentioned before, I own and operate Quality Technical Books. While I started out carrying quality engineering and electrical engineering books, my big sellers these days are amateur radio books. Yesterday, I received a new shipment from the ARRL with some books that I hadn’t carried before. Here’s a short review of three of them:

• Radio Amateurs World Atlas. I sell both the ARRL Map of the World and the the ARRL Azimuth Map of the World. They’re very nice maps, but the Radio Amateurs World Atlas is more detailed than either of them. For one thing, this book has more space for place names, such as cities and island names.
     It also shows the call regions in each country that uses them. So, for example, if you work a JA8, you’ll know that he’s located on the island of Hokkaido.
     What you give up, of course, is the big picture view of the world, but you can always buy both the world map and an atlas and get the best of both worlds. :)
• Stealth Amateur Radio: Operate from Anywhere. Lately, my wife has been making suggestions that we move into a condo. I’d love to do that and give up all the yard maintenance, except for one thing: no place to put an antenna. I suspect many hams–or aspiring hams–are in the same boat.
     For those hams, this book offers some hope. It describes ways of getting on the air, no matter where your shack is. Especially good are the chapters on stealth antennas and how to deal with the inevitable TVI and RFI.
• The Antenna Compendium, Volume 7. This is the latest compilation of antenna articles from QST, and like the others, it has a lot of great stuff in it. One article I really liked is “T-Time for the Analyzers” by Dan Maguire AC6LA. It talks about how you can verfy the accuracy of antenna analyzers, such as the MFJ 259B and the Autek VA1. It also has some interesting articles on 160 meter antennas, including a short, top-loaded antenna, and multi-band vertical antennas.

I also now have the new, 2004 edition of the Handbook, but I’ll be reviewing that in another blog entry.