ARRL digital publications stuck firmly in the 90s

[Rob Seastrom]

Hi all,

I recently became active on HF under my own callsign after years of mostly running club signs and special events with other people's callsigns (and hence logbook entries for LotW and the like).

Seven and a half months later I have the credits necessary to get certificates for WAS and DXCC (both digital), and figured I might as well sign up for ARRL membership for the first time in 30 years, especially since the magazines are now digital and I don't have to worry about pulling the typical ham trick of saddling my next of kin with a giant hoard of boxes of old issues of QST.

Boy, what a disappointment.  It seems to me that there is no way to download a PDF to slap in my ipad and read on mass transit.  Just a reader app from some joint called Pagesuite, which needs connectivity in order to work.

Further investigation under the hood (web inspector) shows that it's not a PDF on the back end that I could coax out of it, but rather a series of jpegs!

On my Mac, I can select all pages and print them to a PDF.  Of course, the suggested name is "QEX.pdf" (for instance).  No YYYYMM or anything like that.

The folks at QCWA get it right.  Antique Truck Collectors of America gets it right.  Telephone Collectors International gets it right.  World Radio History ( https://worldradiohistory.com/QST.htm ) looking at 55 year old issues of QST is a better user experience than looking at current issues of QST straight from the League.  Ironically, it seems that the less money the organization has, the better they do because they follow the KISS principle.  

Am I missing something or did "upgrade your digital publications to meet some sane expectations" somehow get left of the requirements for the recent retool of the League's web site?  No I don't want to "install the app on my ipad".

Has someone written a scraper to just pull down the jpegs and wrap them in PDF?

-r