Robert “Bob” Sternowski

Bob Sternowski spent thirty-four years inside Collins Radio and its successor Rockwell Collins, rising to Director of Engineering at the Cedar Rapids facility that had produced the R-390, the KWM-2, and some of the most respected communications equipment ever built. When he retired in 2003, he did not stop — he simply drove to his other office at Softronics Ltd., the company he had founded in 1984, and kept designing radios. Among his first contracts was a transmitter for NASA that was sent to Venus.^[1]

“I was tired of the big company bureaucracy, but I wasn’t tired of electronics. I still had resistors in my blood.” — Bob Sternowski, WB0LBI^[1]

The Collins Connection

In the world of boatanchor radio, few names carry more weight than Collins. The R-390/URR and its successor, the R-390A/URR, remain among the most revered receivers ever built — monuments to an era when radio engineering was as much craft as science, and when the name on the front panel was a guarantee of uncompromising quality.

Bob Sternowski was not an outside admirer of that tradition. He was inside it for more than three decades, working at the same Cedar Rapids campus where Art Collins had built his empire.^[1] He lived through the full arc of the company’s transition from Collins Radio through the Rockwell International acquisition. That lineage matters. The R-390A community is, at its heart, a community that values the engineering tradition behind the equipment. Bob did not just appreciate that tradition — he extended it and carried it forward into a new century.

Softronics — The Next Chapter

In 1984, while still at Rockwell Collins, Bob incorporated Softronics Ltd. in Marion, Iowa, initially as a consulting sideline. When he retired from Rockwell in 2003, the transition was seamless. The company grew from three employees into a veteran-owned small business employing around twenty-five people, with clients including NASA, Boeing, and Collins Aerospace.^[3] Softronics specialised in custom-designed electronic products and radio systems, with particular expertise in HF through UHF power amplifier technologies.^[4]

Bob described his approach with characteristic directness: his team would come up with out-of-the-box solutions that were generally cheaper and better than what the customer already had. His staff brought an accumulative thousand-plus years of experience, many of them former Rockwell Collins engineers or active ham radio operators.^[1]

Sending a Signal to Venus

One of Softronics’ earliest and most remarkable contracts was the design and construction of an HF transmitter for NASA — a transmitter that was sent to Venus.^[5] There is a pleasing symmetry here. Collins Radio had built the communications equipment that linked NASA’s mission control with the Apollo astronauts. Decades later, a small company in Marion, founded by a Collins veteran and staffed by radio engineers, was building hardware for deep space missions of its own.

The Venus transmitter was not the only government contract. In 2013, Softronics received an SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) award for the design of a novel emergency buoy HF transmitter — an elegantly minimal unit of barely five cubic inches and three ounces, using fewer than twenty-four components per module, designed for extreme power efficiency and extended battery life.^[6]

Technical Contributions

Bob was not only a builder and business leader; he was a researcher who contributed to the technical literature. In the May/June 2017 issue of ARRL’s QEX magazine, he authored an article uncovering historical measurements demonstrating that vertically and horizontally polarised noise can differ by tens of decibels in the lower HF bands.^[7] This is the kind of finding with direct practical implications for anyone designing or operating HF receiving systems — including those of us running R-390A receivers with modern SDR front ends.

His academic publications included work on adaptive radio for multimedia wireless links and a paper on DSP radio trends, benefits, and challenges, both published in 1999 through IEEE.^[8] He was recognised by the IEEE Cedar Rapids section as a subject matter expert on high-frequency technology and manufacturing.^[4]

Career Timeline

Why He Belongs Here

A Boatanchor Legend does not have to be someone who restored radios in their basement, though many are. Some legends are the people who designed and built the equipment in the first place — or who carried that engineering DNA forward so that it did not die with the last production run.

Bob Sternowski is a bridge figure. He links the golden era of Collins Radio — the company that gave us the R-390, the KWM-2, the S-Line — to the modern world of custom HF radio systems, SDR technology, and deep-space communications. He spent a career proving that the traditions of careful, innovative radio engineering that made those classic receivers so enduring could still thrive in a world of microprocessors and outsourced manufacturing.

For those of us who operate R-390A receivers and integrate them with modern SDR platforms like the Hermes Lite 2, Bob’s career arc is a reminder that we are not merely preserving old equipment. We are participating in a continuous tradition of HF radio engineering that stretches from Art Collins’ first transmitter in the 1930s, through the R-390 programme, through Softronics’ Venus transmitter, and into our own shacks today.