Boatanchor Legends · Tribute No. 44
Jay Roman, KBØATQ
The Third Founder, and the Voice that Put the CCA Into Print
An on-air community can run for years and leave behind almost nothing. The Sunday Collins User Net of 1989 and 1990, for all its standing-room enthusiasm and 150-plus check-ins, lived entirely in the volatile medium of a fading 20-metre signal. It became something more durable for one specific reason: Jay Roman put it on paper. In June 1991, with the first issue of the Collins Collector’s Magazine, the gathering on 14.263 MHz acquired the artefact that would, ultimately, turn it into the Collins Collectors Association.
30 December 1990
Jay first appeared on the Sunday net on the afternoon of 30 December 1990 — the same net during which Bill Carns N7OTQ also checked in for the first time. Floyd Soo KF8AT was running the controls. The newcomers joined a group of regulars that was, by then, well past the original seventeen of Bill Wheeler’s February 1989 inaugural and growing weekly. Jay slotted into the operation quickly, and within months had taken on the Sunday-afternoon NCO rotation alongside Bill KØDEW and Floyd.
What Jay brought to the operation, in addition to a steady hand at the microphone, was a publisher’s instinct.
The Magazine that Made It Real
By early 1991, Bill, Floyd and Jay had begun organising the first dedicated Collins gathering at the Dayton Hamvention, scheduled for 26 April. In Bill’s opening remarks at that forum, he announced that Jay would shortly publish the group’s official newsletter, the Collins Collector’s Magazine. The first issue went out in June. It carried Bill’s “History of the Collins Net,” Floyd’s Collins Net News column with new procedures and propagation-based check-in protocols, classifieds, technical notes, and the first formal articulation of what the group stood for. From that moment forward, the Sunday net had a press of record.
It is difficult to overstate how much that mattered. The CCM gave the group a place where decisions could be announced, history written down, members credited, and technical knowledge fixed in print where the next generation could find it. Without it, the CCA might have remained what so many on-air gatherings remain — a happy Sunday-afternoon habit that fades when its principals move on. With it, the group acquired institutional permanence.
1992: From Gathering to Association
In April 1992, with Warren Bruene W5OLY as the year’s guest speaker at the second Collins Forum, the founding trio quietly put in place the mechanism that would convert their informal society into a formal organisation. By the August 1992 issue of the CCM, the inside front cover carried, for the first time, the masthead of the “Collins Collectors Association Board of Advisors.” Bill Wheeler, Floyd Soo and Jay Roman headed the list, alongside Dennis Brothers, Huey Carrol, George Dubose, Jim Bales, Ty Becker, and Bill Carns. The CCA, as an organisation, dates from that page.
Jay’s position on it was, in one sense, simply the published evidence of what he had been doing all along: chronicling, organising, putting names and call signs and procedures into ordered form, and ensuring that the membership knew what it was a member of.
A Founder’s Timeline
30 Dec 1990First check-in to the Collins User Net, with Bill Carns N7OTQ; Floyd Soo at the controls.
Early 1991Recruited as a regular Sunday-afternoon NCO alongside Wheeler and Soo.
26 Apr 1991Co-organises the first Collins Forum at the Dayton Hamvention; Rod Blocksome KØDAS guest speaker.
June 1991First issue of the Collins Collector’s Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1.
Nov 1991First “Annual Collins Collector Dinner” advertised in CCM, scheduled for April 1992 at the Radisson on Needmore Road.
Apr 1992Second Collins Forum at Dayton with Warren Bruene W5OLY; behind the scenes, the founding trio set in motion the formal organisation of the CCA.
Aug 1992CCA Board of Advisors appears on the CCM inside front cover; the association exists in print.
The Long Echo
The Collins Collector’s Magazine that Jay launched in 1991 is the direct ancestor of The Signal, the CCA’s present-day quarterly. Over more than three decades the format has matured from a black-and-white newsletter into a stitch-bound, full-colour journal of twenty-plus pages, with restoration articles, production histories, equipment surveys, member-shack features, and obituaries for the figures of the Collins era as they have, one after another, become Silent Keys. The continuity from CCM Vol. 1 to today’s Signal is unbroken. It is also Jay Roman’s longest-running achievement.
Of the three CCA founders, Jay is the least visible in the public record — not because his contribution was smaller, but because publishers, like good net controls, tend to put the limelight elsewhere. Bill Wheeler ran the net. Floyd Soo wrote the procedures. Jay produced the magazine that bound the whole enterprise together and made it transmittable to the next generation. Three roles, three people, one institution.