Ham Radio Clubs: It's time to move away from the PDF Newsletter

October 18, 2024

It's time for ham radio clubs to move away from the PDF based newsletter as a primary publishing format.

The purpose of this post is to help amateur radio clubs and organizations get their content in front of more hams. The PDF format is problematic because it acts as a walled garden, limiting the ways in which the content inside can be discovered by search engines, social media, and ultimately the hams looking for good information.

The Limitations of PDF

Content is hidden from search engines

Generally, search engines can't read the content within a PDF. That means even if a PDF is made available on a club website, Google may not be able to see the articles inside. Search engine algorithms are designed to read text and HTML, not the ASCII encoded PDF format. If a ham is searching for a topic that matches an article in your newsletter, that ham may never see it.

PDFs don't mix well with social media

If you've ever linked to a web page on a social media platform, you've likely seen the article represented with an image, a clear title, summary, and source. This isn't possible when linking to a PDF. As a result, viewers miss critical information that might describe the newsletter, much less any articles within.

It's too much content all at once

Remember that your newsletter is competing against thousands of other online sources of ham radio content. Any single day a ham can read dozens of new blog posts, articles, videos, emails, and more. Ask yourself as a reader what's easier to consume on any given day: A drip of smaller, consumable daily insights or a PDF that contains dozens of articles. Just reading the table of contents can be the cognitive equivalent of reading a handful of social media posts or viewing a couple short-form videos.

Examples

I'm going to call out a few PDF based club newsletters that contain some excellent content. These groups spend a lot of time and effort putting these newsletters together and the articles they feature are top-notch. The intent of these examples is to illustrate the large audiences that clubs are ignoring (unintentionally) because of the use of PDF. This in no way intends to diminish the club or the content.

SARC Communicator

The SARC Communicator is an excellent newsletter that features articles about many cutting-edge aspects of ham radio such as AREDN mesh setups, HamClock, and the Raspberry Pi series of computers. The September October 2024 issue contains a great article about setting up an AREDN node on Vancouver Island. The article discusses the use of line of sight tools and successfully testing a connection 50 km in distance! This would be a great resource for any ham looking to learn more about establishing an AREDN connection.

Over on Google, I entered a very specific search phrase that included the title of the article and the author's callsign, "aredn ham radio mesh network from comox on vancouver island." No results. Even though the PDF is hosted on Google Drive and linked from Blogger (a Google property), Google can't see it. This leaves a lot of good information out of reach from hams looking for AREDN resources.

Search engines such as Google often can't see PDF content.

Also, while I can link to the PDF from this post, I can't link to the article directly.

The Logger's Bark

The Radio Club of Tacoma publishes a monthly newsletter with a staggering 100+ pages of content. The October issue features an interesting article about a lightning spark entering a ham shack. Unfortunately, this article is also hidden from search engines.

From a promoter's perspective

As a promoter of ham radio content through my weekly email and daily news site, I'm constantly looking for good articles to feature in those publications. I come across so many interesting articles in these PDF newsletters, but I don't link to them because I can't link directly to the article. If I were to link to a PDF, I'm relying on the viewer to take the time to parse that PDF for the referenced article.

While it's not as much of an issue as it use to be, PDF documents can be very taxing on a computer, especially a PDF with a lot of content. However, hams tend to hold on to older hardware which means some of these PDFs can potentially be slow to render and scroll through on older computers and mobile devices. In other words, PDF documents can be a very poor experience compared to an article published to a website.

A better approach for greater exposure

So what's the solution? Publish articles to the web using your club's website tools. Most club sites have the option to publish individual articles. Sometimes this is called a blog. If your site runs on WordPress, you're ready to go, out of the box.

Establish a regular posting cadence

Publish a slow drip of content over time rather than all at once each month. Publish individual articles once or twice a week, or more if your club is producing that much content. This gives individual articles a better chance at being seen.

Publish to multiple channels

Once an article is published, grab the link and post it to social media. This allows a conversation to happen around each article rather than the newsletter as a whole. You'll likely see social media engagement rates increase. Also, make sure your site has RSS enabled. (This is usually a checkbox in settings.) This allows other hams to subscribe to your content and be automatically notified when a new article is published. RSS also helps Google News pick up on your articles. Learn more about getting your site set up for Google News.

A place for PDF newsletters

Many club members prefer the PDF newsletter format, and that's just fine. Continue to publish that PDF for that group. But for a larger audience, make sure those articles are also being published individually on the club website. That will ensure that publishers like me pick up your content and highlight it for an even larger group of hams.

73
K4HCK