Boatanchor Legends · Tribute No. 42
Rod Blocksome, KØDAS
Collins Engineer, Historian, and the Man Who Brought a KWM-3 to Dayton
On 26 April 1991, when Bill Wheeler, Floyd Soo and Jay Roman opened the first Collins Forum at the Dayton Hamvention to a standing-room crowd, the man they had asked to give the technical address arrived from Cedar Rapids carrying a working “KWM-3” prototype — a dual-VFO transceiver that Collins had built and never released. He was a serving Rockwell Collins engineer, a Kansas farm boy in a hotel-room conference, and the keeper of more institutional memory about Collins Radio than almost anyone alive. Three and a half decades later, Rod Blocksome is still serving the same community in the same quiet, methodical way.
From a Kansas Wheat Farm to Cedar Rapids
Rod grew up on a wheat farm in western Kansas. The hook was set early: his grandmother, sensing where his attention was going, gave him a console-type shortwave receiver when he was thirteen. He took the novice exam in 1960 as KNØDAS and has been an ARRL member since 1962. Kansas State University followed, with a BSEE in 1968 and an MSEE in 1973. Between the two degrees came four and a half years of active duty as a US Air Force officer doing HF communications systems engineering — taken as a leave of absence from Collins Radio, where he had already begun his career.
He never really left Cedar Rapids after that. Forty-two years at Collins Radio and Rockwell Collins, retiring as a senior systems engineer.
The Engineer
Rod’s professional design work spanned 450 kHz to 2 GHz and power levels from ten watts to forty-five kilowatts. He led the design of several Collins HF transmitter power-amplifier families, both vacuum-tube and solid-state, and the management of the engineering design teams that built them. His name belongs on the schematic of more high-power HF iron than almost any working engineer of his generation.
The Historian
For all his time on the bench, Rod’s most enduring contribution to the Collins community may be one he made out of working hours. He turned, after his retirement, to the documentation of Collins production history — serial-number runs, design changes, sub-variant identification, total quantities built. The CCA reflector became his laboratory: he posted survey requests, members responded with their serial numbers, anomalies and provenance notes, and Rod assembled the responses into the production-history papers that now anchor the technical archives at collinsradio.org.
His 51S-1 production survey alone settled questions that collectors had argued about for decades, including the seemingly small but historically important matter of who, exactly, led the design of the receiver. (It was Ed Andrade WØDAN, the same engineer who had brought forth the 51J-4 and the KWM-2.) Similar surveys covered the KWM-2, the 75A-series, the S-Line, and the 32S-series transmitters. Each one is a primary-source document. Each one was patiently assembled from member submissions, cross-checked, and given away.
The 1991 Forum and the KWM-3
The Sunday afternoon CCA net had been running on 14.263 MHz for two years when Bill Wheeler KØDEW, Floyd Soo KF8AT and Jay Roman KBØATQ secured a forum room at Hara Arena for the first dedicated Collins gathering at Dayton. It was 26 April 1991. The room was packed beyond capacity, attendees pressed into the doorway. Bill opened with a short history of the net. Then Rod stood up to give the technical talk — “The History of Collins Amateur Radio Gear” — and put on the table a working engineering prototype of a dual-VFO Collins transceiver designated, internally, the KWM-3. The room had never seen one. The room never would see another. Rod’s presentation that afternoon was, in many ways, the moment the Collins Collectors Association acquired its institutional credibility.
He has been a fixture at the CCA ever since, his name appearing across the magazine, the archives, and the annual forums.
The Delano Rescue
In 2014, with the former Voice of America relay site at Delano in central California scheduled for demolition, Rod went to work with the CCA and the Antique Wireless Association on a quiet salvage operation. The Delano DL-8 station, on the air since 1944, housed a Collins 821A-1 250 kW HF transmitter — one of the auto-tuned giants developed by Warren Bruene’s team in the 1950s, capable of shifting frequency anywhere between 3.95 and 26.5 MHz in twenty seconds. Without intervention, it was going to the scrapper.
Working with the AWA and a handful of fellow former Collins engineers, Rod helped plan and execute the retrieval. The transmitter was disassembled, trucked across the country, and re-erected at the AWA museum in Bloomfield, New York, where it stands today as the only surviving Collins 250 kW broadcast transmitter on public display. It was, in the most literal sense, an engineer rescuing his predecessors’ work.
Howland Island
Beginning in November 1998, Rod and a team of six other Collins engineers began donating their spare time to a problem an order of magnitude older than any of their transmitters: locating the Lockheed Electra in which Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared near Howland Island on 2 July 1937. The project, sponsored by Nauticos LLC, applied modern signal-propagation analysis, oceanographic modelling and deep-ocean sonar techniques to the search problem.
Rod spent seven weeks at sea in the spring of 2002, and another seven weeks in 2006, conducting deep-ocean sonar searches of a remote area of the Pacific. The aircraft has not been found. The body of analysis that Rod and his colleagues produced — on Earhart’s radio operations, on the geometry of her final intercepts with the USCGC Itasca, and on the propagation conditions that night — is now part of the durable record of the mystery.
ARRL Service and Bands Worked
In February 2010, ARRL President Kay Craigie N3KN appointed Rod as Vice Director of the Midwest Division. He subsequently served as Midwest Division Director. He has been an ARRL Life Member since 1962, sixty-four years of continuous membership and counting.
As an operator, Rod has worked on every amateur band from 1.8 MHz up to 2304 MHz. He has held Australian callsign VK2IHY and Kiribati callsigns T30CXX and T32DAS, the latter activated as part of CCA-affiliated DXpeditions tied to the WØCXX (Art Collins) commemorative operations. The breadth of bands worked, and the willingness to put a Kiribati call on the air to put the Collins flag in a rare DX entity, is characteristic.
A Working Legacy
Rod Blocksome belongs to a small generation of engineers who built modern HF communication on top of Warren Bruene’s SSB foundations — the people who took the techniques developed in the early 1950s and turned them into the auto-tuned, solid-state, MIL-SPEC equipment that defined Collins Radio’s second half. He is also the closest thing the Collins community has to a working archivist: a Collins engineer who treated the historical record of his own company as an engineering problem and applied himself to it with the same patience he brought to a 10 kW PA design.
He is still on the air. The CCA reflector still benefits from his patient, detailed answers. The KWM-3 prototype he carried to Dayton in 1991 has, by now, passed into Collins folklore. The historical record it stood in for is, in no small measure, the record Rod Blocksome has spent the last three decades writing down.