Boatanchor Legends · Tribute No. 40
Bill Wheeler, KØDEW
The Quiet Founder of the Collins Collectors Association
On a Sunday afternoon in February 1989, a Missouri ham with a fondness for Collins gear keyed up on 14.263 MHz and called the first informal gathering of what would become the largest, longest-running tribute net in amateur radio. Seventeen operators checked in that afternoon. Within five years there would be more than 1,200 members, a quarterly magazine, an international banquet, and a board of directors. The man who started it never wanted the limelight, and very nearly didn’t take any of it.
A Net Built on Courtesy
Bill Wheeler was a Lebanon, Missouri schoolteacher and principal who had been licensed since 1956, the year he picked up the call KNØDEW as a teenager. By the late 1980s he had accumulated a respectable bench of Collins equipment and discovered, in casual on-air conversations, that he was far from alone in his admiration. “They produced,” he liked to say of Collins Radio, “the very finest equipment available.”
He decided to formalise the gathering. A small classified ad in QST announced a Sunday afternoon meet-up on 14.263 MHz. The first net, in February 1989, drew seventeen check-ins. By the mid-1990s the Sunday net was running over four hours, regularly logging 150 or more participants, with an estimated 300 to 400 SWLs and silent listeners following along.
That tone was not accidental. Bill set the cultural template from the first net and reinforced it in every welcome, every NCO handoff, every Collins Collectors Magazine column. Operating in a manner that would “make Art Collins proud” was the standing instruction, and it became the unwritten constitution of the CCA. Newcomers to the Sunday net heard it in the first ten minutes; old hands enforced it by example.
From Net to Institution
Bill had no taste for personal recognition, and his instinct from the outset was to delegate. He recruited Bud Whitney K7RMT as the first regular co-NCO and a technical authority for repair and restoration questions. When Floyd Soo KF8AT (now W8RO) first checked in on 5 November 1989, Bill pulled him into the net-control rotation within months. When Jay Roman KBØATQ arrived in December 1990, the same thing happened. By early 1991 the three were planning the first Collins Forum at the Dayton Hamvention.
The forum room they secured at Hara Arena for 26 April 1991 was standing room only, with attendees pressed into the doorway. Bill opened the meeting with a short history of the net; Collins engineer Rod Blocksome KØDAS gave the technical address and brought a KWM-3 prototype dual-VFO transceiver for the room to see. A year later, at the 1992 Hamvention, the same trio — with the help of ex-Collins SSB-pioneer Warren Bruene W5OLY — quietly put in place the structures that would, by August of that year, become the Collins Collectors Association, with Bill listed first on the Board of Advisors.
Bill went on to serve as President of the CCA. When the sunspot cycle turned and the twenty-metre evening nets faltered in 1993, it was Bill and Floyd who lobbied the membership onto 75 metres, eventually settling the group on 3.805 MHz and later 3.875 MHz, where Collins-equipped operators still gather today.
Beyond the Radio Room
The CCA was, in many ways, the smallest of Bill Wheeler’s public undertakings. In Lebanon he served as Mayor Pro Tem and as a member of the City Council. He was the early organiser of the Laclede County Civil Defense Group, which became the county’s Office of Emergency Management. He founded the Laclede County Route 66 Society and was instrumental in establishing the Route 66 Museum within the Lebanon-Laclede County Public Library. He served as Events Coordinator at the Cowan Civic Center and as Past President of the Lebanon Rotary Club. He was a U.S. Army and National Guard veteran, a former teacher and principal at Joel E. Barber School, and across his sixty-four years on the air he was, by his own friends’ tally, personally responsible for hundreds of new amateurs sitting and passing their licence exams.
Through all of it he was an unrelenting DXer. At his Silent Key he had 339 of 350 entities confirmed on the ARRL DXCC Mixed honour roll. The one missing piece, by then almost impossible to chase, was Crozet Island.
Silent Key
Bill Wheeler became a Silent Key on 17 April 2020, at the age of eighty. At his request there were no services; donations in his memory were directed to the Lebanon-Laclede County Library, the same building that now houses the Route 66 Museum he helped bring into existence.
It is difficult, three and a half decades after that first afternoon on 14.263 MHz, to overstate what Bill set in motion. The Collins Collectors Association is now an international organisation with an archive, a magazine, three HF nets, a Senior Technical Staff, and an annual presence at every major amateur convention in North America. None of it would exist had a Missouri schoolteacher not decided, on a quiet Sunday in February 1989, that the conversations he was already having one at a time deserved a frequency, a time, and a small ad in the back of QST.
He never wanted the limelight. He got something more durable: a community that operates, even now, in the manner he asked it to.