Boatanchor Legends · Tribute No. 47

Glen E. Zook, K9STH

First Article at Seventeen, and Six Decades Without Stopping

Glen Zook wrote his first article for 73 Magazine in 1961, at the age of seventeen, on how to modify a Heathkit Globe Chief for six metres. Over the next fifty-nine years he never really stopped. Articles, mailing-list posts, forum answers, paint-formula charts, troubleshooting guides, Petitions for Rulemaking to the FCC, replies to questions posted at three in the morning by a kid in Ohio trying to get an Apache transmitter to load — the cumulative output is staggering, and almost all of it is still on the internet, much of it still under copyright notice and still authoritative. K9STH was, by a margin that may never be matched, the most prolific public-facing technical writer in the post-1960 boatanchor community.

A Teenager in Indiana

Glen took his first amateur licence as a teenager in the K9 call district — Indiana, in those years, before the call-area mechanics changed — and held the call K9STH for the rest of his life. He kept the call when he moved to Texas, in the manner of pre-vanity-call amateurs who valued the continuity of their original district designation. By 1961 he was already on the published-author side of the hobby, contributing to 73 Magazine in its first full year of publication under Wayne Green. The Globe Chief six-metre conversion article was the first; many followed.

The Motorola Years

Glen’s professional career was in commercial two-way radio engineering at Motorola, with a focus on the land-mobile and public-safety sectors. The bench discipline showed in his amateur work for the rest of his life: alignment procedures done by the manual, paint colours matched to the original factory specification, replacement components chosen to original tolerance and original voltage rating. The boatanchor community received the benefit of a working RF engineer’s notebook, made publicly available, for sixty years.

Z-Communications and k9sth.net

Glen operated under the trading name Z-Communications Company from his Richardson, Texas QTH, the same Dallas-metroplex suburb that, by coincidence, was home to Warren Bruene W5OLY, the Collins SSB engineer. Through Z-Communications and his personal site at k9sth.net (and the parallel k9sth.com), Glen published a small but indispensable technical archive: paint-formula PDFs for Heathkit, Hallicrafters, Drake and Collins finishes; alignment procedures for boatanchor receivers and transmitters; modification notes for two-metre and six-metre amateur conversions of commercial land-mobile gear; and the long-running “Faux Heathkit Paints” chart matching Heathkit factory colours to commercial rattle-can equivalents.

For two decades the K9STH paint charts were the working reference. Restorers shipped their chassis off to be powder-coated or stove-enamelled with K9STH-spec formulas in hand. The archive remains online at k9sth.net under the original copyright notice, with the same standing republication permission Glen granted in 2019: copyright maintained, no editing, no charge for publication, and a copy of the publication furnished back to him. The terms still apply, as does the courtesy of honouring them.

A Working Index of Subjects

No single subject defines K9STH’s technical writing — that is, in fact, the defining characteristic. Over six decades on the Heathkit mailing list, the Boat Anchors mailing list, the Collins reflector, the R-390 reflector, QRZ.com forums, eHam.net, Antique Radio Forums, and his own published archive, Glen wrote authoritatively on:

The Petitions

Glen had strong opinions, held them in public, and was prepared to act on them through the proper channels. The most documented example is his sustained, six-year campaign at the FCC to restore the old “three-minute rule” for amateur station identification — the pre-1990 provision under which a station was permitted to identify only at the end of a series of transmissions if the series lasted under three minutes, rather than the current ten-minute rule under Section 97.119(a). Glen believed, on good operational grounds, that the older rule produced cleaner, more efficient on-air practice.

He filed a Petition for Rulemaking in May 2006. The FCC opened it to public comment, received around a hundred responses, and dismissed it in 2007. He filed again in April 2009. Dismissed. A Petition for Reconsideration in December 2009. Denied in May 2010. A fourth petition in 2011, finally dismissed by the Commission as “repetitive” under Section 1.401(e) of the FCC’s rules. Four formal filings, four rejections. He did not file a fifth. The episode is part of the K9STH legend: a man who, when he believed the FCC had gotten a rule wrong, was prepared to spend six years and four formal Petitions saying so, in writing, on the public record. Most amateurs grumble about rules over coffee. Glen filed.

The Boatanchor Shack

Glen’s personal collection was, by his own account on the QSO Today podcast in 2017, organised around a simple principle: he kept restored copies of every rig he had ever owned, from his first equipment as a teenage novice through every transition of his amateur career. Each restoration was carried out to as-new condition, paint matched to factory spec, alignment to manual. The collection, when assembled in the Richardson shack, was an autobiography in steel and tube glass — the operating history of an American amateur of his generation, kept museum-quality on his own bench.

Silent Key

Glen E. Zook became a Silent Key on Wednesday, 22 July 2020. He was eighty-two. The news travelled the boatanchor community by the channels he himself had populated for decades — the QRZ forums, the K5RWK Richardson Wireless Klub list, the Heathkit and Collins reflectors, the Amateur Radio Newsline of 21 August. The thread on QRZ that announced his passing carried hundreds of replies. The recurring phrase, in among the technical anecdotes and reminiscences, was the simple one: you will be missed.

A Working Legacy

Six decades of technical writing on every brand and topic that matters to a boatanchor restorer; a paint-formula archive that is still in working use by the community; a homebrew permissions framework that anticipated, by a decade or more, the way the open-content movement would handle attribution and republication; four FCC Petitions filed with the calm conviction of a man who had read the rule book and disagreed; and the affection of a community that, twenty-four hours after his passing, was already trying to keep his archives alive.

Glen was not, by any sensible accounting, a Collins-collector specialist in the manner of Bill Carns or Bud Whitney, nor an SSB engineer in the manner of Warren Bruene. He was something rarer and arguably more useful: the public-facing technical writer of the boatanchor era, working at scale, working in the open, working for free, and working with the bench rigour of an engineer who had built two-way radios for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in the morning before sitting down to write a paint-matching article in the afternoon. Sixty years of that, mostly on his own time. There is not another contributor in the boatanchor era who comes close.

The k9sth.net archive remains. The community he wrote for remains. The paint formulas still work.