How good is your tech writing? How savvy are you about radio broadcast tech topics?
If you answered “very” to these questions, you should be writing for Radio World! But there’s another publication that wants your contributions too.
The National Association of Broadcasters plans a new edition of its venerable “NAB Engineering Handbook.”
The prior edition is shown on sale at the NAB’s online bookstore. “First published in 1935, this will be the 11th edition of this industry-standard reference book, with an anticipated release date of April 2017,” NAB said in an announcement. (For the deep trivia-minded: Can you list its prior years of publication?)
This effort will be led by several people familiar to our readers. The editor-in-chief is Garrison Cavell, a broadcast engineering consultant and president of Cavell Mertz & Associates.The associate editors are David Layer, senior director of advanced engineering at NAB; Tom Osenkowsky, engineering consultant and contributor to Radio World; and Skip Pizzi, senior director of new media technologies at NAB, who is former editor of Radio magazine and also a past contributor to RW.
They plan to take on “numerous emerging technology topics not covered in previous editions, along with comprehensive revisions of earlier subjects.” Cavell spoke in the announcement about wanting the book to be not a “heavy scholarly work filled with equations and esoterica that will sit on shelves unopened,” but a more approachable, understandable reference. They also plan to include a more international perspective.
(If NAB’s work in significantly updating its much smaller but still very useful book “A Broadcast Engineering Tutorial for Non-Engineers” in 2014 is any indication, we can look forward to good things from this latest project.)
The book will have 120 chapters, and the editors need contributors. Each author will receive a copy of the book and an honorarium — but really, this kind of thing is done as a service to the industry, and I salute all who have worked on the handbook, past and present.
If you are a “skilled practitioner” — if you know a lot about broadcast fundamentals, regulation, streaming, EAS, disaster recovery, AM concepts, electrical systems, broadcast automation, satellite infrastructure and/or any specialized area of our industry and are reasonably adept at writing about it — drop them a line by Sept. 1.
You can find a list of topic areas along with the contact information at http://nablabs.org/eh11.asp. Tell them you read about it in Radio World.
(Years of publication were 1935, ’38, ’46, ’49, ’60, ’75, ’85, ’92, ’99 and 2007, according to NAB’s announcement of the prior edition in 2007.)
