Thank you to the staff from Wavescan for this week's feature on Collins Radio Company.
Jeff: For four decades, Collins Radio Company of Cedar Rapids, Iowa set the absolute standard for American communications engineering. No other manufacturer in the country came close to what Collins built, or how reliably they built it. One of their communications receivers, the R390-A, was well-known to DXers of a certain age, but the Collins brand disappeared and hasn’t been heard of for decades. So, what happened? Here's Ray Robinson in Los Angeles to tell us the story.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. When I first became a shortwave listener around 1970 or so, I avidly devoured information from club magazines and DX shows that then were carried by various international broadcasters. I was awed by the range of communication receivers some listeners detailed along with their DX catches, which were way beyond my meagre budget at the time. Two receivers that stand out in my mind from back then were the American-made Collins R-390A, and the British-made Eddystone EC-10, banks of which could be seen in photos of the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park near Reading, England. (What an amazing job that must have been – they actually paid people to sit at state-of-the-art communications receivers and seek out distant shortwave signals!) Anyway, my mind got to thinking recently about the R-390A, and why we don’t hear of Collins Radio anymore these days. So, I did some research, and here’s what I found.
At one time, Collins Radio was regarded as being the best communications equipment company in the world. The United States Military trusted it for their bombers. NASA trusted it for the moon. And for four decades, it earned every bit of that trust.
So, why did it collapse? It wasn’t because of competition or bad engineering. It turns out the founder of the company, Arthur A. Collins, ended up destroying the company by being right about the future, but at exactly the wrong time.
In the basement of his family home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 22-year-old Arthur Collins began building radio transmitters by hand in 1931. He founded the company two years later on First Avenue in Cedar Rapids with a single obsession – to build the most reliable, most precise communications equipment that American engineering could produce, with no shortcuts, no mass-market compromises – just performance, tested to its limits.
In that same year, 1933, Admiral Richard E. Byrd selected Collins Radio to supply communications gear for his second Antarctic Expedition. The challenge was brutal. The equipment had to survive sub-zero temperatures on the Ross Ice Shelf, mechanical punishment during transport across Antarctic terrain, and the unpredictable atmospheric interference of the auroral zone at the bottom of the world.
Collins supplied a complete shortwave broadcasting station built around a massive 20-B transmitter. On February 3, 1934, from a base camp called Little America, the team successfully transmitted the first live voice radio broadcast from Antarctica to the United States. Battling gale-force winds and temperatures below -20F, Collins Radio equipment kept the signal clear, carrying Byrd’s voice across thousands of miles to New York, from where CBS carried it to a national audience.
The equipment had been built in a Cedar Rapids factory that had existed for less than a year, but word spread fast. Military and commercial broadcasting contracts followed, and by the start of World War II, Collins was a respected regional manufacturer. By the end of the war, it was an industrial power house.
The war transformed Collins because of one specific problem it solved: frequency changing under fire. Aerial warfare required radio operators aboard bombers to switch communication frequencies rapidly. In a B-29
Super Fortress at 25,000 feet over the Pacific with enemy fighters on the wing, the traditional process of manually tuning variable capacitors across multiple amplifier stages took minutes – minutes that crews did not have. Collins solved this with the ‘Autotune System’. It was an electro-mechanical assembly of motors, cams, slip clutches and limit switches that physically rotated every tuning element in the transmitter to a preset position with absolute mechanical repeatability. A radio operator selected one of ten preset channels on the ART-13 airborne transmitter, and the machine retuned itself across its oscillator, multiplier and power amplifier stages in under 25 seconds. The system even automatically reduced output power by 50% above 25,000 feet to prevent the risk of high-voltage arcing in thin air.
By the end of the war, 90,000 ART-13 units had been manufactured
But with the close of the war, Collins pivoted hard into the commercial and amateur markets. The equipment they produced in the late 1940’s and 1950’s became known collectively as ‘the black boxes’, named for their stark utilitarian cabinets with black crinkle-finish paint. They were not glamorous products, but they were precise ones, and precision, as it turned out, was exactly what Cold War intelligence required.
In 1954, Collins introduced the R-390A receiver, designed for military and government intelligence use. It became one of the finest tube-based radio receivers ever built, even if it was the very definition of a ‘boat anchor’ radio. The secret was the mechanical filter technology embedded in its intermediate frequency chain. Instead of relying on electrical components to achieve selectivity, Collins engineers discovered that they could convert radio signals into physical vibrations, pass those vibrations through precision-machined metal discs made from a nickel alloy called Ni-Span-C and convert them back into electrical signals, because mechanical resonance achieves quality factors far higher than electrical circuits. The result was what engineers called ‘brick wall selectivity’.
With this technology, the R-390A could isolate one shortwave signal from an adjacent jamming transmission with a sharpness that competing designs simply couldn’t match. That was the kind of capability that made signals intelligence analysts very happy. As a result, the U.S. Military contracted not just Collins, but also Motorola, Electronic Assistance Corporation, Stewart Warner, and several others, all to build R-390A receivers to Collins exact specifications. Over 55,000 units were manufactured across a production run that lasted 30 years.
By 1958, Collins was ready to bring the same engineering philosophy to the civilian amateur market. The result was the S-Line – a series of transmitters and receivers finished in light grey enamel. And in the fall of 1959, Collins released the KWM-2 transceiver – a single chassis integrating the full capability of the S-Line transmitter and receiver, with a central tuning knob and signal meter. It weighed just over 18 lbs, and covered from 3.4 to 30 MHz in 14 segments of 200 kHz each.
In the 1960’s, the U.S. Military used these models under very challenging conditions in Vietnam, where the operators reported that they simply ‘worked’. When NASA was preparing to go to the moon, Collins became an indispensable partner in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Every astronaut’s voice from space in those programs passed through Collins equipment. For the lunar missions specifically, they developed a ‘Unified S-Band System’ - a single unified radio link that could carry voice, television, telemetry, command signals and precision ranging data across 240,000 miles of space on one carrier frequency in the microwave S-band, around 2.2 GHz. That, along with the ground-based tracking stations they built for the system in California, Spain and Australia, was no doubt the pinnacle of Collins’ achievement. But unfortunately, it was then in the late 60’s and early 70’s that the company began to fall apart. In the space of just two years, Collins Radio Company became functionally bankrupt.
The reason was a project called the C-System. Starting in the mid-1960’s, Arthur Collins had become consumed by a vision for a fully integrated communication, computation and control network, one that would connect distributed computers – much as local area networking and the Internet does today. He was right about where the world was going, but wrong about when it would get there! The computer hardware of the 1960’s was too expensive, too physically large, and too slow to make the C-System viable. But Collins poured thousands of engineering hours and increasingly desperate capital into its development.
At the same time, government contracts that had been plentiful during the Vietnam War and Apollo moonshot programs began to dry up, and competitors were releasing solid state equipment. Collins couldn’t keep pace. In the fiscal year ending August 3, 1971, Collins made a net loss of US $46.6 million. Between 1969 and 1971, Collins had cut 40% of its workforce, but it wasn’t enough. A few weeks later on September 2, 1971, North American Rockwell bought the company, and Arthur Collins was forced to leave the board. By November 1973, Collins Radio had been fully absorbed into Rockwell International.
Arthur Collins died in 1987. Today, more than 60 years after they were built, surviving examples of the R-390A receiver and KWM-2 transceiver still perform to their original specifications and they command serious money on the collector market. And my budget still doesn’t extend to one, even now!
Back to you, Jeff.
