Wayne Spring

Wayne Spring was one of those rare amateurs whose licensed career bridged the entire modern history of the hobby. When his first CW signal went out under the call W6IRD in 1949, Collins Radio had not yet released the 75A-1; Arthur Collins was still a working engineer in Cedar Rapids; and military surplus R-390A receivers were years from rolling off the production lines at Motorola and Collins. When Wayne went Silent Key in 2025, the hobby he had served for seventy-six years was communicating through software-defined radios, FT8, and Web-888 streams — yet his workbench at 1243 Fairway Drive in Orange, California, had never stopped being the place where weary KWM-380s, tired 75S-3s, and forlorn 30L-1 amplifiers were brought back to factory specification.

Wayne operated at the intersection of three communities that do not always speak to each other: the Collins Radio restoration fraternity, the Southern California DX scene, and the AM boatanchor crowd. He was respected in all three, and as president of the Southern California DX Club he was one of the few people who could move comfortably between a Visalia DXCC honor-roll banquet and an AM roundtable on 3880 kHz without missing a beat.

First Licensed 1949

Wayne’s Elmer was Max Anders, W6AQL, and the station that launched his career was characteristic of the late 1940s: a homebrew transmitter paired with a Hallicrafters receiver. Homebrew in that era meant genuine ground-up construction — cutting chassis, winding coils, assembling transformers, and learning by the scorch marks on one’s bench. Wayne’s lifelong restoration philosophy carried the fingerprints of that beginning. He believed that an amateur who did not understand what was happening inside his rig was operating half a station.

By the time Collins released the S-Line in the late 1950s, Wayne had a decade of homebrew experience behind him. He recognized immediately what made the Collins designs different — the deliberate attention to mechanical stability, the use of filters as gates rather than afterthoughts, the way Art Collins’s engineers thought about phase noise and PTO linearity as first-order problems. That recognition shaped what would become Wayne’s life’s work.

A Partnership Spanning Six Decades

Wayne married Sharon, a native Californian from Norwalk, in 1963. Their partnership became one of the most recognizable in the hobby. Sharon did not hold a license for the first forty-one years of their marriage — she was, as she described it herself, an attentive audience at every club meeting, antenna party, and satellite tracking session — but in 2004 she tested and earned her own ticket as K6IRD, taking the matched-pair call. Together they ran DX stations out of the Orange house: Wayne on CW and AM from one position, Sharon running 20- and 15-meter DX from another. Sharon went on to earn DXCC on both bands, WAS, and WAZ.

The IRD callsigns became a fixture on 7155 kHz, on the Western AM Club’s W6AMI frequencies, and on the Southern California DX Club’s nets. When Eric Guth 4Z1UG interviewed them together as Episode 012 of the QSO Today podcast in October 2014, he framed the conversation not just as a radio interview but as a lesson in what a shared hobby can do for a marriage. At that point they had been married fifty-one years.

The Collins KWM-380 and HF-380 Expert

Wayne built his reputation as the west coast authority on two of Collins’s most sophisticated and most feared transceivers: the amateur KWM-380 and its commercial sibling, the HF-380. These were the Cedar Rapids company’s first fully synthesized, microprocessor-controlled HF transceivers — radios that weighed fifty pounds, filled a sixteen-by-eighteen-inch cabinet, and contained enough discrete circuitry that a mid-tier technician could quickly find himself lost inside the frequency synthesis chain.

The KWM-380 accumulated a long list of Collins service bulletins during its production run, covering everything from microphone impedance corrections and transmit spectral purity to the famous SB-16 frequency synthesis fix. Working on these radios required access to genuine Collins parts — particularly for the optical encoder, the PA, and the AGC board — and the ability to interpret service information letters that Collins distributed only to authorized technicians. Wayne maintained a working stock of original Collins components, and for decades he was formally listed in the Collins Collectors Association service directory alongside Howard Mills W3HM, Hal Guretzky K6DPZ of LandAir Communications, and Bob Struk KX6K.

His work was not limited to the 380 series. Owners of the S-Line — the 75S-3 receivers, 32S-3 transmitters, KWM-2 and KWM-2A transceivers, 51S-1 general-coverage receiver, and the 30L-1 linear amplifier — routinely sent their radios to Orange when they wanted factory-correct alignment rather than approximate functionality. The 651S-1, with its three-inch-thick original manual and characteristic synthesizer complexity, was another Wayne specialty. Period sale listings for properly aligned Collins gear frequently included the phrase “checked out by Wayne Spring W6IRD” as a quality seal.

Beyond the Bench — 355 Zones Confirmed

A Collins technician who did not operate would have been, in Wayne’s worldview, a contradiction in terms. He was a serious DXer. His Worked All Zones total reached 355 countries confirmed — a figure that places him solidly in the company of the most committed DX operators of the post-war era. To achieve a number like that requires not only the equipment (which Wayne had in abundance) and the antennas (multi-band beams and wires at his Orange home) but also decades of patient listening and pile-up discipline.

Wayne served as president of the Southern California DX Club, an organization with roots stretching back to 1947 and a half-century partnership with the Northern California DX Club in running the International DX Convention at Visalia — the event many American DXers consider the benchmark gathering of the hobby. The SCDXC dissolved in December 2024 after seventy-seven years, a loss to the Pacific coast DX community that Wayne felt keenly in the final year of his life.

The AM Side and the Morning Group on 7155

Although Wayne was a DXer by discipline, his heart belonged equally to the boatanchor AM community. He kept a T-368 — the military AM transmitter that remains one of the great brick-house designs of the tube era — on the floor of his shack, and he was active in the W6AMI Western AM Club, where Sharon served as net control on the third Wednesday of every month.

On the 7155 kHz morning group — an informal gathering of west coast hams who met at 7:20 AM Pacific time seven days a week — Wayne became one of the anchors. The group’s archives preserve audio of Wayne telling stories from his youth, including recollections of Pismo Beach during the Second World War. His contributions to that group were quieter than his CCA work but no less significant; he was one of the hams who gave younger operators a window into what ham radio had been before solid-state, before the internet, before repeaters.

Wayne on Camera

Wayne and Sharon made several substantial media appearances that remain accessible to anyone who wants to understand the partnership. In December 2011 they were featured on Episode 28 of Ham Nation, Leo Laporte’s TWiT production hosted by Bob Heil K9EID, Gordon West WB6NOA, and George Thomas W5JDX. The segment showed Wayne’s workshop and shack, including a surface-mount soldering demonstration that put to rest any notion that boatanchor restorers were unwilling to engage with modern technique.

The QSO Today interview of October 2014 remains the single best primary source for Wayne’s restoration philosophy. Eric 4Z1UG drew out of him a set of working principles that deserve to be remembered: always replace aging capacitors rather than trying to reform them; measure carbon composition resistors for value drift rather than assuming them; respect original Collins wiring harness routing because it was engineered to prevent parasitic oscillations; keep rigs moving by restoring and passing them along rather than hoarding them.

It is the one piece of advice that applies equally to a green tech on a first KWM-2A and to a senior engineer doing a final synthesis-board alignment on an HF-380. It was the philosophy of a man who had spent seventy-six years building, breaking, and healing radios, and who had arrived at the conclusion that the best work was always the work done patiently.

Contributions to the Collins Collectors Association

Wayne’s service to the CCA was not limited to being a name in the service-technician directory. He was an active donor — in 2011 alone he contributed two 516F-2 speaker grills to the CCA prize raffle pool, a gesture that says a good deal about the man given how difficult those grills are to source. His work kept countless KWM-380s and S-Line stations on the air through what would otherwise have been terminal failures, and the chain of radios he touched now extends through second, third, and fourth owners who may never know his name but who are still hearing his alignment work every time they tune across 14 MHz.

Wayne’s Advocacy for the Next Generation

In his later years Wayne spoke pointedly about the need to engage young people with hands-on technical learning. He rejected the common lament that kids today would not be interested in amateur radio. His view was that curiosity about radios, Morse code, or homebrew robotics had never been special to any particular generation — what had changed was that modern children were surrounded by prepackaged entertainment rather than left to make their own discoveries. The answer, for Wayne, was not to lower the standards of the hobby but to offer kids the genuine article: the smell of hot solder, the feel of a precisely made chassis, the first QSO on a receiver they had helped bring back to life. That was the same pathway his Elmer Max Anders had offered him in 1949, and Wayne believed it worked as well in 2020 as it had seventy years earlier.

Legacy

The measure of a boatanchor legend is not the number of radios he owned but the number of radios he kept on the air for others. By that standard, Wayne Spring belongs in the first rank of Collins community figures. The KWM-380s and HF-380s that continue to run on 20 meters and 75 meters every evening are running in substantial part because Wayne refused to let them die. His work is embedded in the hardware in a way that outlasts him — the alignment stays right, the capacitors he installed keep their values, the wiring harnesses he respected continue to do their job of preventing oscillations that the original Collins engineers anticipated.

For the Collins restoration community — for the CCA, for the dwindling ranks of KWM-380 owners, for the operators who remember when SCDXC banquets filled a hall at Visalia — Wayne’s passing marks the end of an era. May his signal find the good DX he spent a lifetime chasing.

If you are a member of Wayne’s family, a CCA colleague, or a 7155 morning-group regular and can provide the exact date of Wayne’s passing or additional biographical detail, please contact VK6ADA via the site contact form. This tribute is a living document and will be updated as the community provides corrections and additions.