If you enjoy radio and broadcasting history, you will absolutely love an amazing web site with hundreds of radio magazines online. Full text and many searchable. 

Recently I came across a web site that left me speechless. American Radio History is a labor of love by broadcast executive David Gleason. He says this site has five million pages of broadcasting history. David’s collection is organized in categories such as business periodicals, music, ratings and audience research, yearbooks and broadcast engineering. Shortwave, electronics, hobby radio and DX’ing are well represented, as well. You can also find contributions from many countries including Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. Many of these radio magazines online date back to 1913.

If you have ever wanted to do research on almost any kind of broadcasting topic, this collection of radio history will keep you occupied almost indefinitely. Some of my favorites include:

• Broadcast Engineering and Broadcast Engineer’s Journal which cover nearly 80 years of the technical side.
• Broadcasting and Canadian Broadcaster which cover the business side over a similar time frame. Also Broadcasting Yearbook for every year since 1935.
• Billboard and Cash Box magazines, as well as Airheads Survey Archive, which track music on the radio.
• Many consumer magazines including Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics and Electronics World. Even Byte magazine.
• Familiar journals from the SWL and DX world including Monitoring Times, Popular Communications and The Short Wave Magazine.

You must take a look.

Radio Magazines Online – Look but don’t touch

The good news is that all of these magazines have been professionally scanned and are great quality. Many of them are fully searchable through the web site. The bad news, for some, is that you cannot download any of the files. They are protected.

Offering this copy protection is probably how the site got permission to upload and maintain such an amazing collection. Many of these periodicals might otherwise be lost.

For the moment, most ham radio magazines are not included.