Boatanchor Legends · Tribute No. 43
Bud Whitney, K7RMT
“K7 Rocky Mountain Time” — The Bench That Kept the Collins Fleet Alive
By the time Bill Wheeler keyed the first Collins User Net on 14.263 MHz in February 1989, Bud Whitney already had four decades on the bench behind a soldering iron. Within months he became the net’s first technical net-control operator — the man other operators were directed to when a 516F-2 hummed, a KWM-2 drifted, or a 30L-1 wouldn’t load. He held that role, in one form or another, for the rest of his life. More than five hundred 516F-2 power supplies passed across his bench. Almost certainly more KWM-2s. The CCA christened the highest honour for restoration work in his name, and then presented it to him.
Rocky Mountain Time
Bud chose his callsign in the manner of his generation, fitting words to the letters of a phonetic. K7 was the call district, the Rocky Mountain region of the old American West, and he made it “K7 Rocky Mountain Time.” The phonetic stuck. For decades, on the Sunday afternoon Collins net, Bud announcing himself on the air as “K7 Rocky Mountain Time” was, for thousands of listeners, the sound of the band having opened up to the right people.
By the time the CCA was a going concern, Bud and his bench had relocated south to the hill country outside Wimberley, Texas, where Bill Carns N7OTQ would later establish his KØCXX shack. The two became a quiet two-man centre of gravity for Collins repair work in the south-central United States — Carns the engineer and editor, Bud the technician and patient diagnostician across the workshop.
The Net’s First Technical NCO
Bill Wheeler KØDEW, founder of the Sunday net, had no taste for the spotlight and was determined to share the net-control duty from the outset. Bud Whitney was the first of the originals to step up. From late 1989 onward he ran the net regularly. On the afternoon of 5 November 1989, when Floyd Soo KF8AT — the future co-founder of the CCA — checked in on his KWM-2 for the first time, it was Bud at the controls. Floyd recalled the experience nearly four decades later as the moment that hooked him on the Collins community: a well-run, courteous, technically literate gathering, with the bench expert in the chair.
That technical literacy was the part Bud brought to the format. He answered questions on the air, on the phone afterwards, and in the workshop the following week. His role from 1989 onward was not unlike a country doctor’s — Sunday afternoon office hours, with the rest of the week reserved for the work itself.
The Five Hundred 516F-2s
By the time the CCA awarded Bud the “516F-2 Filter Choke” Award in 2009, he had rebuilt more than five hundred 516F-2 power supplies. Anyone who has owned a KWM-2 knows the supply — the matte-grey companion box without which the radio is a paperweight. Bud’s overhauls were thorough: filter cap replacement, choke inspection, mains rectifier verification, bleeder current check, full bench-test before return. Five hundred of them. The number was plausible only because Bud never stopped working.
When the original Collins-spec filter chokes for the 516F-2 became impossible to source, Bud did something that captured his approach to the Collins fleet: he funded the initial run of new manufacture himself, out of pocket, so that the chokes would be available at a sensible volume-cost to other restorers. The CCA “516F-2 Filter Choke” Award — presented to Bud in absentia at the 2009 Dayton Hamvention and then formally at the Wimberley CCA breakfast that July by Mac McCullough — was the community’s acknowledgement that the man whose name was on the award was also the only reasonable recipient for the first one.
In Print: The 32S-3 Paper
Bud’s contribution to the CCA archive was not only on the bench. With Bill Carns he co-authored “Repairing the 32S-3,” the canonical reference paper for troubleshooting and overhauling the second Collins S-Line transmitter. The article remains hosted today in the CCA’s RX For Your Collins technical archive, alongside the Bruene-coupler paper, the 51S-1 production survey, and the rest of the foundational documents. Bud’s contributions to that paper are unmistakable to anyone who has seen him work: precise, sequential, with the procedure described in the order in which a technician actually performs it, and with the failure modes given in the order in which they actually appear.
The Hill-Country Workshop
For at least the last two decades of his life, Bud’s workshop sat in the Texas hill country outside Wimberley. Visitors described it as a working bench, not a museum: test gear set up the way the work demanded; replacement parts laid out in the order he used them; whatever Collins set was in front of him at the moment open and instrumented. The pace was deliberate. The output was extraordinary. Every restoration that left the workshop had been tested, retested, and confirmed against the factory spec.
The Wimberley breakfasts — the same first-Thursday-of-the-month gatherings at which Bud was presented his award in 2009 — continued in one form or another after he was gone, providing a small local meeting place for the CCA in the south-central United States. Bud’s presence had been one of the reasons the gathering existed.
Silent Key
Bud Whitney became a Silent Key in the early 2010s, in or about his ninety-second year. The precise date is not in the public record this writer was able to consult; the earliest contemporaneous notice of his passing appears in a February 2013 message from CCA President Bill Carns, who referred to Bud, in passing, as “now SK, but one of the most prolific 516F-2 overhaul guys.” His tools were, by every account, still in front of him very nearly to the end.
A Working Legacy
Bud Whitney spent his life giving Collins equipment another decade, another twenty thousand hours, another generation of operators. The fleet of Collins radios on the air today — the KWM-2s ragchewing on 75 metres, the S-Line stations checking into the Sunday net, the 30L-1s loading up into ten-metre yagis — is on the air in considerable part because of him. There is no plausible accounting of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Collins restoration that does not put Bud’s bench somewhere near the centre of the page.
In 2026, more than a decade after his Silent Key, Bud Whitney appeared again on the cover of The Signal — a tribute cover for one of the figures the CCA has most reason to remember. Floyd Soo, in announcing the issue to the membership, did not feel he needed to introduce him. Everyone on the list knew who Floyd was talking about. Bud Whitney was, by some considerable margin, the longest-serving working technician in the Collins community of his era, and one of the longest-serving in amateur radio of any specialty anywhere in the world.