Storing and Accessing Articles on your Hard Drive

QST Browser can access articles that are stored in an internal or external Mac OS X hard drive (or DVD discs).

In addition to the ability to read hard drives many times faster than reading from an optical drive, you have the convenience of having all the issues in a single place and not have to swap discs in and out of the optical drive as you search and browse through the issues.

When redirected to a hard drive, QST Browser will first search for files on the hard drive, and if not successful, it will then search the optical drive. Please note that you cannot update your database from the hard drive. You must update the database from the original CD-ROM.

For QST Browser to use the page images, all of the files for each publication must be contained in a single folder. Figure 1 shows an example of such a structure:

arrlpubs
Figure 1 - Hard Drive Structure

Notice that there is a folder called QST View and all the data from the CD-ROM discs are stored into it as sub folders. The location of this main folder is not critical. You can create this folder at the top level of a volume, or as deep into it as you like. In the case of Figure 1, I have created the QST folder inside of a folder called ARRL Publications. The names of folder are also not critical.

Each publication is stored in its unique folder. In the above example, you can see that I have created another folder to store the issues of Communications Quarterly. Please note that these main folders (the QST View and Communications Quarterly folders) need not be co-located inside a common folder. They can even be stored on separate drives. QST Browser does not care.

When you open a CD-ROM volume, you will notice that each disc can contain one or more folders which has a year's worth of articles. The folder for the year 1915 QST is stored in a folder whose name is "15". The 1970 issue is in a folder named "70", the 2001 issue of QST is in a folder named "101", etc.

In addition to these annual folders, the disc may contain other files and folders. Those are Windows specific files and folders and you do not need to copy them to the hard drive. Click open the CD-ROMs and drag copy just the required folders to your hard drive.

In the example of Figure 1, you can see that I have made copies of Communications Quarterly issues for the years 1990 through 1999, and QST issues from 1970 through 1974.


Setting up Hard Drive Preferences

To get QST Browser to search the hard drive before searching the optical drive, you will need to specify the location of each publication's main folder. This is done using the QST Browser Preferences. The Preferences are persistently saved to the plist file (~/Library/Preferences/w7ay.QST Browser.plist) when you quit QST Browser.

Open the Preferences by selecting the Preferences... menu item in the QST Browser menu from the Menu Bar. Each publication has its own field for storing its folder name. You can either type the folder name directly into the text field or, more conveniently use the Browse button to navigate to the folder you want. Figure 2 shows the selection that matches the file structure of Figure 1.

prefs
Figure 2 - Hard Drive Preferences




Hard Drive space required

Please be aware that the page images are moderately large and you will need a lot free hard drive space. The 1970 Issue of QST View, for example takes up over 130 MB of space, and the 1970-1974 box set take up almost 700 MB.

In my case, I have all current QST View CD ROMs (1915 to 2004), the QEX collection (1981-1998), the Communications Quarterly disc (1990-1999) and all of the ham radio Magazine (1968-1990) stored in a 30 GB folder on a USB 2.0 hard drive (a 60 GB video iPod). You can see the space savings in the picture below. Happiness is being able to take your entire QST collection to read at the beach!

iPodsmall
Figure 3 - Storage Compression

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