Surfin': The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
June 29, 2002

This week, we surf to a trio of Web sites that honor the king of Amateur Radio: Collins Radio.

In my youth, I worked at ARRL Headquarters, occupying the second seat in what was then called the Public Service Department--right next door to the Contest and DXCC Departments. I spent many lunches discussing the state of the art with the folks from those departments (Messrs Frenaye, Halprin, Jennings, Search and Street) and learned more about radio during the two years I worked at Headquarters than I had learned during my previous eight years in the hobby. One thing I learned was that Collins was king.

Some days, instead of talking about ham radio, I spent my lunch hour spinning the dials of the Collins equipment at W1AW, learning firsthand why Collins was indeed the king. I could not afford Collins equipment and had a variety of non-Collins equipment at home, but I had a key to W1AW and would activate the station as often as I could, usually sitting in front of the Collins console.

WA3KEY's Virtual Collins Radio Museum is a first-class Web site for learning about Collins Radio equipment.

Those days are long gone, but recently I acquired a pair of Collins units for a song: a 32V-2 transmitter and 75A-1 receiver. Except for the Collins emblem on the front panels of the radios, I knew zilch about these antiquities, so I surfed the net to find out more. I came upon three Web sites that were most useful in expanding my knowledge about my recent acquisitions.

In alphabetical order, they are the Collins Collectors Association Web site run by Sandy Meltzer, KW6KW; the Collins Radio Association Web site maintained by Dave Knepper, W3ST; and the Virtual Collins Radio Museum assembled by Norm Drechsel, WA3KEY.

Viewing these three sites, you can probably learn everything you want to know about Collins gear. I sure learned plenty about the Collins receiver and transmitter I picked up, such as why they were so hard to pick up (they weigh 57 and 105 pounds respectively). You can find specifications, manuals and even vintage advertisements for some of the Collins line. Information for troubleshooting and repairing the radios is also on-line. If you do not want to repair a Collins yourself, there are links to those folks who will do it for you.

Each of the three sites has links to other Web sites that can expand your knowledge even further. Beyond Web sites, each of these three sites has links for joining e-mail lists that discuss Collins radios in near real-time. There is also information about on-the-air Collins radio nets.

Until next time, keep on surfin'

Editor's note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and is a member of the QQCC (QST quarter century club), i.e., he has been a QST writer for 25 years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager), but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio. As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan has been a long time advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio and wrote programs to dupe contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he uses his Mac to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio Web page. To contact Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.