Updated 9/4/2023.   The more than 121 issues of Hot Iron contain information about dozens of topics.  It can be difficult to find all entries about a single subject, scattered across all issues.

To overcome this difficulty, K4ZAD has done a great service by compiling all issues into four searchable .pdf documents using OCR technology.  If scanned into a single .pdf, the resulting 90-100 mb file might have overwhelmed many browsers so breaking it into four files solves that problem.  These compilations will make topic searches vastly easier and faster!

The four documents below constitute a compilation of all Hot Iron issues: 121 as of this date.  The earlier issues have been OCRed and combined with the fully searchable issues which start with #89.  This makes the entire compilation searchable for desired keywords or phrases.

The compilation was split into four documents both to ease downloading and to make keyword searches quicker.  To reduce the size of the compilation many issues were run through a PDF compressor, so in some cases original color images will be gray scale.

How to use these files:   Simply open the desired file (listed below) and then type CTRL+F (Windows) or CMD+F (Mac) to open the file’s search box.

There, type the desired search word, such as ‘oscillator,’ or phrase like ‘crystal oscillator.’  Use the search box up/down arrows to move from one item to the next.  Note:  Repeatedly pressing <enter> is better for this on some PDF viewers and some browsers so use whichever method works best for you.

Hint:  Save the files to a folder on your PC and use your PDF viewer to open and search them.   That way you won’t have to go to the website every time you want to use them and they will be natively searchable on your PC.

Here are the four compiled files:

Compilation #1 Issues 1-49)
Compilation #2 Issues 50-75
Compilation #3 Issues 76-100
Compilation #4 101-last issue

Warning:  In giving his permission for this compilation Tim Walford, G3PCJ, wrote, “I do think that any collection of the earlier issues (say under #50) ought to be covered in a “health or truth” warning!  Old age makes me realize that I did write some rubbish early on —”

Consider yourself cautioned and to make it easy to avoid these issues if desired, the first 49 are all in the first document.  However the good content in those issues probably outweighs any of the “rubbish” that Tim warns about.