Harold Collins and his wonderful 75A

 

 

This story originally ran in the January, 2003, issue of the amateur radio magazine, QST

By Joel Thurtell

One crisp Saturday afternoon in October 2001 I chanced to see the red light blinking on my Radiofinder answering machine. In those days, in addition to writing for the Detroit Free Press, I ran a small mail-order business buying, repairing and selling old ham radios, and I called my one-man company Radiofinder. On this day, I was in a hurry –- my family was headed for  the Detroit Institute of Arts and they were waiting for me.

I couldn’t resist pushing the playback button.

A man’s voice said he’d heard I buy old radios. Did I want to buy a Collins 75A-1 receiver? Complete, he said, with a mechanical filter adapter, a Central Electronics Sideband Slicer and speaker.

More than interesting. Through my used ham equipment business I had just sold a highly-modified and really fine 75A-1 from the late 1940s. I sold it reluctantly because I have a real soft spot for the 75A-1. And there is a reason for that.

The caller said his name was Merritt Wissman. His phone number, he said, was area code 616-897-something. My ears perked up. 616? Western Michigan, where I grew up. 897? Hey, that’s my hometown, Lowell!

Impossible!

But — could it be?

I wondered: After all these years, could this be the radio I’ve most wanted to find?

Some memories never fade. It was a crisp fall evening in 1958. I was an eighth-grader at Lowell Junior High School and I’d thought of building a radar transmitter and receiver as a science fair project. As I’d delved into the subject at the Lowell library, I realized the technology was beyond my junior high resources. Our family belonged to the First Congregational Church in Lowell, and at coffee after Sunday service somebody told me another church member was a ham radio operator. His name was Harold Collins.

In those days I made pocket change peddling the Grand Rapids Press and it happened that Harold Collins lived at 225 N. Jackson St., — right at the heart of my paper route. I was a shy kid, and starting up conversations was hard. But I had this tantalizing image of people sitting in front of black boxes talking to other people over long distances without any telephone wires. I wondered how this Harold Collins did that, so one Saturday  morning as I made my collections, I knocked at his door. Harold’s wife, Alma, paid me for the paper and then, before leaving, I blurted out my question about ham radio.

There was no doubt that her husband had something to do with radio. Atop their two-story house was a metal tower and some kind of tubular contraption. I would later learn that it was a 4-element Gotham 10-meter beam.

Mrs. Collins asked me to wait. She thought her husband would want to talk to me. Then Mr. Collins came to the door. I guess he was a guy in his fifties. He had some gray hair, but what did I know? I was 13 years old and all adults seemed elderly. What Harold said had me whistling through the rest of my collections. Why didn’t I come back the next day a bit before nine o’clock in the evening? Each Sunday he talked to some friends in Grand Rapids and I could see what ham radio was all about.

That Sunday evening, Harold Collins led me to the unused bedroom that had belonged to his older son. He called him “Joe” sometimes and other times “Gardner.” Joe or Gardner had been out of the house for several years, first in the Navy and by 1958 he was an electrical engineering student at the University of Michigan. On the wall above the desk was something curious –- letters and a number carved out of wood to spell “W8FNH.” Joe’s ham radio call sign, Harold explained.

On the desk, on center stage, was a dark gray metal box with an electrical meter on the left upper panel and a big glass window in the center. Under the window was a smaller, curved glass window. The big window had lines with marks on the glass, but only one small section of glass was lit at any time. A big knob turned a red pointer that traveled back and forth behind the window. Behind the curved smaller window a circular piece of plastic with more black marks rotated as the knob turned.

This, Harold said, was his receiver. It was a Collins 75A-1. Collins, no relation to him, he laughed. But that company happened to make the best radio equipment in the world, and he felt lucky to own this receiver.

In a metal rack standing on the floor was Harold’s transmitter. It looked very neat and was homemade, by whom I didn’t know. It was an amplitude modulation, or AM, transmitter, and when nine o’clock showed on his clock he switched it to transmit and gave his callsign, W8LEZ. Except that he and everyone he talked to said, W-Eight-L-E-Zed.

The antenna on his roof, he explained, was a 10-meter rotary beam aimed at Grand Rapids. His 75A-1 receiver was tuned to 28.620 megacycles, the frequency where his good buddies would be listening. Soon, his transmitter was on and he was chatting away, telling what he’d been doing since he talked to them a week ago. Then, suddenly, he announced that he had a visitor in his “shack” whose name was Joel, and he was handing the mike to me.

I was flumoxed. I never imagined that I’d be talking on the radio. I took the microphone, gulped, and stammered a few lines about being a junior high student who was interested in radar and so on. Finished, I shoved the mike back at Harold and hoped I’d never have that experience again.

Little did I know. It was that very evening that one of the Grand Rapids hams quipped that I was “Joel from Lowell,” a monicker that stuck as long as I operated radio from my hometown.

During the week, that session in Harold’s ham shack stayed with me. I went back the following Sunday. Again, the 75A-1 was on, and I looked more carefully at it. Harold explained the calibration on that big billboard of a dial glass. Frequency. He drew a picture of a sine wave and explained how that was one cycle. In those days, by the way, we spoke of cycles, kilocycles and megacycles, not Hertz. Harold explained that “kilo” was Greek for thousand and “mega” meant million. So you could say twenty-eight-point-six-twenty megacycles or twenty-eight-thousand-six-hundred-twenty kilocycles. Or twenty-eight-million-six-hundred-twenty thousand cycles.

The 75A-1 was a wonderful teaching tool, because the ham portions of the high-frequency radio spectrum were in horizontal lines, backlit, and easy to conceptualize. Most other radios, I would find, had circular dials, part of which disappeared as you turned them.

Ten meters could be a very busy place in the late 1950s. Sometimes while Harold was talking to his pals in Grand Rapids, we’d hear stations from California booming in on nearby channels. That’s when Harold would lift the lid of the 75A-1, reach inside and pull a tube out. He’d take a gray metal object off the table and insert it in the socket where the tube had been.

This object, he explained, was a mechanical filter adapter. Then he explained what a mechanical filter is. Again with pencil and paper, he drew a picture of something he called a “transducer” and explained about a phenomenon called “magnetostriction.” A transducer, Harold said, changes electrical energy to mechanical energy. A microphone or loudspeaker is a transducer. In Latin, it means to “lead across.” The transducer leads the energy from the state of electrical to mechanical energy. As mechanical vibrations, the signal passes through a series of metal districts which resonate at a certain frequency but reject energy beyond that resonant frequency. You might say they select that frequency, rejecting signals at other frequencies. Having passed through the discs, a second transducer returns the vibrations to electrical energy for use once again in the receiver. If you insert such a device, resonant at 455 kilocycles, into a receiver’s 45 kilocycle intermediate frequency stage, it will easily pass signals that resonate with it but lop off those that don’t.

These were all new words and concepts, and I’d take them to school and mull them over for days. Working 8-pounders like “magnetostriction” into eighth-grade lunchroom conversation isn’t easy, but I was too excited not to try.

April 29, 1959 is a date I’ll never forget. That day I stopped at Harold’s house with a sealed envelope in my hand. Harold took it and we went into his shack. He had me sit down and send Morse Code to him. Then he sent some Morse back to me. Satisfied that I understood, we went to his office. When he wasn’t hamming, Harold was an accountant to many businesses around Lowell. I sat down at his desk and he opened the brown envelope. He handed me a 20-question Novice ham radio test. A few minutes later, I handed it back complete. In June 1959, the mailman delivered a little white Federal Communications Commission envelope and I discovered my new identity: KN8PSV.

By then I’d built my first receiver –- a 3-tube regenerative set, the Knight-Kit “Ocean Hopper.” It was pretty sensitive, but had poor selectivity. My hand moving near the panel would change the frequency. But the price, eleven bucks, seemed good. I don’t know what happened to the Ocean Hopper. I probably threw it out or traded it off. My next receiver cost $100. It was a National NC-173, and a real receiver.

Harold Collins warned me that it was a “single-conversion” receiver. More new words. The NC-173 would convert the signal at, say, 14.2 megacycles down to the one and only intermediate frequency of 455 kilocycles. But the conversion process produces two signals –- the wanted signal, and another, weaker “image” signal 455 kilocycles away. I would hear duplicate signals 455 kilocycles away from the real signal, Harold assured me. That did not happen with the 75A-1, which had “dual conversion.” By converting the signal twice, the receiver eludes the unwanted image.

It was true. I heard images on the NC-173. But that receiver was a real radio –-it even had a radio smell -– lubricating oil heating up as the tubes warmed made for a comfy feeling on a cold winter night.

The National had two dials, so how you set one dial affected the frequency readout on the other dial. The idea of having two knobs –- main and bandspread tuning -– attached to two separate variable capacitors for frequency control seemed like a defective idea after my exposure to the one-dial 75A-1. The 75A-1 was not the first single-dial receiver –- National did the same thing with its HRO and NC-101 receivers.

But Harold explained that where Collins was years ahead of the pack was in their use of “permeability tuning.” You could vary frequency either by changing capacitance or inductance. Other manufacturers used variable capacitors to change frequency. Not Collins. Instead of one or two variable capacitors, whose values were more easily affected by changes in temperature, Collins varied inductance in its variable intermediate frequency oscillator. The knob of Harold’s receiver turned a lead slug through a coil in this “permeability tuned oscillator.” According to my 1948 ARRL “Radio Amateur’s handbook,” permeability was then a concept mainly applied to power supply chokes. The idea was to increase the number of electromagnetic flux lines in a coil by introducing a core of iron plates. Instead of fixed plates, Collins constructed an iron screw or slug that would turn in a coil. As the iron slug moved in and out, it would change the number of electromagnetic flux lines which also changed frequency. This approach was less prone to heat-induced drift –- it gave great stability, Harold explained. It also made it possible for each turn of the slug to change identical amounts of frequency. This meant “linear” dial calibration was possible. Suddenly the ham had close to frequency meter accuracy in that big dial. And that was not the end of permeability tuning for the Collins designers. The knob turned a shaft connected directly to the permeability tuned oscillator, which eliminated any backlash, the bugaboo of some radios. But the dial shaft also is coupled by gears and a belt to additional permeability tuning coils on a moveable platform. The iron cores of the coils for the first radio frequency amplifier, first and second mixer and first intermediate frequency amplifier all move together. It’s called “gang tuning.” All of this permeability tuning makes for tremendous selectivity and stability.

My image of the perfect radio was Harold’s 75A-1. I had Collinsitis. By the late 1950s, the current Collins ham offering was the 75S-1, but that was way out of my league. I was a paperboy with a weekly income of ten bucks. I could add to that by working on an onion farm in the summer, mowing neighbors’ lawns, selling Christmas cards. But even the later out-of-production receivers, like the wonderful 75A-4, were too costly.

Eventually, I scraped up enough money to buy a used Collins 75A-2 and matched it with a Collins 32V-1 transmitter. I worked lots of 10-meter DX with that set-up and connected with a few of my neighbors’ television sets, too. The 32V-1 had no shielding to cut down harmonic radiation.

Most of us were still using amplitude modulation when I graduated from high school in 1963, but AM’s reign soon would be over. I went to college, but when I came home I would visit Harold. It was Harold who had explained the beauty of single-sideband to me, using that 75A-1 dial as his blackboard: Imagine the carrier on this calibration mark and consider that when AM is applied, two sidebands appear. One is 3 kilocycles above the carrier, the other 3 kilocycles below. Six kilocycles of band space for the AM transmitter. What if you removed a sideband? Three kilocycles of band space. If everybody did it, the effective spectrum would be doubled. Now, what if you removed the carrier? No more squealing heterodynes!

Even better, he said, now making marks with pencil on paper, consider a carrier with 100 watts of power. Modulated at 100 percent, it should have 50 watts of audio –- 25 watts in each sideband. What if you removed a sideband –- 25 watts – and the carrier – 100 watts – and poured their 125 watts into the remaining sideband? You’d have 150 watts of  power in the speech part of your signal, instead of a mere 25 watts. Quite a bargain.

I was hooked on sideband as well.

With its permeability tuned oscillator, the 75A-1 did not suffer from the frequency drift of other receivers. Such drift was acceptable and maybe not even noticeable on AM where the signal was 6 kilocycles broad. But with the carrier and one sideband gone, it is essential that a receiver hold the single sideband signal without any frequency shift. Otherwise, what you hear sounds like Donald Duck.

What the 75A-1 lacked was a detector for sideband. Harold had to back off the RF gain and run the audio wide open to compensate for strong signal overload. In the 1950s and early 1960s when many hams still were on AM, this was not such a problem. But by 1963, when I went off to college, it was clear that sideband was taking over. Harold was all for it.

But Harold loved his 75A-1. And he had a solution. It was called the Central Electronics Model B Sideband Slicer. It was a stand-alone unit meant to take sideband signals from the intermediate frequency output of a conventional AM receiver and process them with a product detector. The Slicer also had a Q-multiplier to improve selectivity.

One problem: By this time, the early 1960s, Central Electronics was out of business. I recall a visit to Harold’s house when he was very disillusioned. He’d been running advertisements in the Ham Trader Yellow Sheets for a Slicer. People had responded –- Hey, I’ve got a mint Slicer, send me your money. Harold sent his money two or three times and got back junk. Finally, someone sent him a fine-looking Slicer.

Harold’s son was by this time an electrical engineer designing avionics equipment and living in California. On a visit to Lowell, Hal modified the 75A-1 so it would work with the Slicer.

I came back from college and visited Harold, who demonstrated what the 75A-1-Slicer combination could do. It was amazing –- he’d tune the A-1 to a sideband signal and then finely adjust the Slicer’s vernier until the voice sounded so good you’d think the person was right there in the room.

The 100-watt AM transmitter made way in Harold’s shack for a Heath Marauder sideband transmitter. A Heath Warrior linear amplifier allowed Harold to keep weekly skeds with his son in California.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was in college and graduate school, living in Kalamazoo, Germany, England, Ann Arbor, Mexico, Africa and finally southwestern Michigan. I hadn’t seen Harold in some time, but I heard of him. My uncle, Charlie Houseman, was an old friend of Harold and related that he’d finally bought a brand-new rig. Some kind of transceiver.

On December 23, 1981, Harold and Alma Collins were going to look at a Nativity scene near their Congregational church in Lowell. It was dark and snowing hard. As they crossed the street a driver, blinded by snow, struck and killed Harold and Alma.

When my parents came to visit at Christmas, my mother told me. It was unbelievable. This great guy, who had taught me so much, was gone.

Some time later, my mother called to say Harold’s son was selling his ham radio equipment. Was I interested?

To tell the truth, yes, of course. I was interested in one thing. Harold’s 75A-1. It was the first ham radio receiver I’d ever seen. It was an icon to me, the perennial teaching prop as Harold had explained this and that principle of radio.

More than that even, it was –- to me –- a part of my memory of Harold Collins.

The idea of trying to acquire a piece of his property after such an untimely, tragic end repulsed me. I said no, I didn’t want to take part in any sale of his radios. The idea seemed almost ghoulish.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t think about Harold’s 75A-1. Often, very often, I thought about it. What, I wondered, ever happened to that radio? Probably sold to an overseas collector, I assumed.

I’ve bought and sold several 75A-1s. I know why Harold considered it a premier receiver. It was, in fact, a major step forward in receiver design. Collins touted it as a revolutionary concept in receivers when they introduced it in 1947. In the manual, Collins called it “the first really new amateur receiver since the advent of the superheterodyne circuit.”

Not only did the Collins engineers use a permeability tuned oscillator and permeability tuned circuits from antenna input through first intermediate frequency stage for tremendous stability. Where all other receiver designers called for simple tuned circuits in the first radio frequency amplifier stages of their receivers, Collins had crystal-controlled converters translate the received radio signals to the first mixer. Actual tuning was done with the permeability tuned variable frequency oscillator running between To the inherent stability of permeability tuning they added the stability of the crystal oscillator. Because the quartz crystal converter stage used fixed frequencies, the first intermediate frequency stage is tunable between 2-3 or 4-6 megacycles. Then, to dodge those images (Collins claimed 50 db. of image rejection) the signal was converted again to the second intermediate frequency of 500 kilocycles. “The receiver features an image ratio, selectivity and sensitivity not found in many receivers of modern design,” the 75A-1 manual boasts.

Stability and 1 kilocycle dial accuracy alone were major advances, and Collins copied the 75A-1 in its 51J, a general coverage receiver the firm introduced in 1949 mainly for government customers. The 75A-1 principles appeared in later 75A-2, -3 and –4 models, through the 51J-4 and in the 75S receivers and KWM-2 transceivers, survived fore decades until the technology was replaced with frequency synthesis.

Over the years after Harold’s death, I tried to contact Harold’s son. I knew he’d dropped W8FNH and had a California callsign, but I didn’t know what it was. I’d heard him referred to as “Joe” and “Gardner.” With the Internet, I’d plug “Joe Collins” and “Gardner Collins” into search engines and get nothing. Then in February 2000, he came to me. That month, QST published my cover story about a Collins 75A-4 homebrewed by a onetime Collins technician. “A 75A-4, One Piece at a Time” caught the eye of an engineer in southern California. His name was not Joe, it turns out –- that was just an on-air nickname he used back in Lowell. And Gardner was only a piece of it –- his middle name. No, he was like his dad, Harold Collins, now W6JES and going by Hal.

Hal, the son of my mentor Harold Collins, is an antenna design engineer who worked on Apollo, GPS and space shuttle projects. We corresponded several times by e-mail, but I never asked him what happened to his dad’s 75A-1.

The phone rang that crisp October afternoon and I heard one Merritt Wissman, KA8DMP, aka “Curly,” describe a virtually mint 75A-1 with mechanical filter adapter, Central Electronics Slicer and speaker. Yes, he was just outside Lowell.

I asked him if he’d known Harold Collins.

No, he said. He never knew Harold.

Well, I thought, close but no cigar.

But, Curly added, “I bought his 75A-1 at an auction from his son.”

So Harold’s radio had found me.

As we ambled through the art museum that afternoon, my mind was only partly on those wonderful suits of medieval armor, the great Picassos and the amazing Diego Rivera mural.

I’d arranged to visit Curly the following Tuesday. It was election day, and my Detroit Free Press assignment would begin after polls closed. I had the day to collect Harold’s 75A-1.

I’ve gone on some pretty exciting radio quests. When I first got the homebrew 75A-4, it was something of a curiosity which over time, as I considered and reconsidered it, revealed itself as an amazing find. When I was offered the Central Electronics 100-R (November 1998 QST, “Zenith’s One-And-Only Ham Receiver) I put the phone down and drove straight to Chicago.

As we got ready to go to the museum, my wife, Karen Fonde, listened as I described the call from Curly.

“It’s a big deal,” she said. “It’s part of YOUR history.”

This was a radio that could mean much to only one person. Well, maybe to Hal, too, but as I would find, it was my experience of sitting for hours in Harold’s shack before that lit billboard dial that made this MY one-and-only receiver.

I’d never embarked on so personal a radio quest.

The day before I went for the 75A-1, I sent an e-mail to Hal Collins.

“Hal –- Over the years, I’ve wondered what happened to your dad’s 75A-1. That was the first amateur radio receiver I ever saw. I recall him lifting the lid to pull a tube and insert that mechanical filter adapter. He explained then how a mechanical filter works. He tuned onto a sideband signal and explained how SSSC works. I also recall how much trouble he had getting a used CE Slicer, with guys selling him their junk boxes. And I remember when he finally had a Slicer, demonstrating how slowly the vernier would tune across a signal, making it intelligible. I can trace my fixation on Collins Radio gear to that receiver and your dad’s tutelage. And as I say, I’ve often wondered where it was. Shipped to Japan, probably. I wondered what it would take to find that radio. I mean, locating it, to me, the RadioFinder, would be the ultimate Radio Find.

I found a message from a guy who says he bought your dad’s 75A-1 in an auction you held. The radio never left Lowell.”

Hal sent this back: “Joel, your note is something special about dad’s receiver. Off the top of my head I’m not sure who bought it at the estate sale back in ’81. That was a pretty messed up time, Some things I remember vividly. Other stuff is smushed. Affected me for years. Especially around the 23^rd of December. Am sure anxious to find out about your visit. It must be Dad’s A-1. This event is outstanding. Or maybe it’s best described as ‘awesome.’ “

Lowell is a two-hour drive from my home in Plymouth, Mich. Maybe less on this day. Curly’s house is in the country, easy to find, just off the Interstate.

We shook hands, exchanged curt greetings and he led me into his shack. There, sitting on a shelf above his Kenwood transceiver and near a Collins 75A-4, was Harold’s A-1.

Curly said he decided to sell the 75A-1 after reading a story in November 2001 CQ magazine by Joe Veras, N4QB, which mentioned the revolutionary receiver from Collins. That story made him think he had a valuable collectible. Curly  knew from reading QST that I’m interested in old ham radios. So he gave me a call.

Curly was not a ham when he was high bidder for the 75A-1. The ham ticket came later, inspired partly by his ownership of that wonderful 75A-1.

I turned the 75A-1 on and switched on the Slicer. Signals came pouring out of the 75A-1 like they did that evening in 1958 when I first saw this set.

Here it was, a five minute drive from where Harold lived in Lowell.

And here was I, loading his 75A-1 into my car.

Twenty-one years after Harold’s death, did I feel like a ghoul snatching up his radio?

No. I felt exhilarated. I was communing with not only my past, but with the personal history of a man who helped me learn about radio.

From Hal, I learned the story of how Harold and Hal happened each to buy a 75A-1, unbeknownst to the other.

It was in 1955, and Hal was in the Navy, stationed in Kodiak, Alaska. He and his dad had together dreamed of finding a 75A-1. The station in Lowell used a Hallicrafters SX-43 – a decent radio, but no match for the Collins. In Kodiak at the Navy base, Hal was using a National NC-183-D –- “a great performer,” recalls Hal. “Personally, I wanted a Collins receiver. Model? Hadn’t decided.”

“Collins had all the attributes: Selectivity, stability, sensitivity, bandspread, calibration, etc. The A-1 was being traded for the newer A-2 and A-3 at the time. Henry Radio in West L.A. was reselling the A-1 for something like $180 for a good, clean unit. With some minor modifications described in CQ ca. 1952, performance could be greatly improved, e.g., two or three changes in vacuum tube types resulting in lower front end noise and greater throughput gain. So I told Dad that I was going to get an A-1 when I  got out of the Navy. It was significantly less in cost than the newer Collins receivers.”

“As it turned out, I had the chance to obtain an A-1 while still in Alaska, unbeknownst to dad. And unbeknownst to me, dad bought an A-1 for me from World Radio Labs, Leo Meyerson’s operation in Council Bluffs, Iowa. So when I returned to Lowell in April, 1955, Surprise! Surprise! So dad kept his A-1 which he substituted for the SX-43 . And I kept my A-1.”

Hal said his wife, Dottie, was not excited about this purchase.  Harold and Hal were paying about $200 for the 75A-1 in 1955. Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to $1,318 today.  No wonder Dottie was not thrilled. But it’s better than the 1946 price of $375  when it was new. That would be $3,394 now.

From Hal, I learned that my radio mentor was Lowell’s radio pioneer as well. In his twenties in the 1920s, Harold Collins and a friend built the first radio in town. With a 200-foot-long wire antenna, the could pull in stations like KDKA in Pittsburgh and KOMX in St. Louis. A collection of his dad’s home-built broadcast radios inspired young Hal to build two-tube regenerative receivers during World War II. Via shortwave radio, Hal, a junior high kid, heard news of the Japanese surrender in 1945.

“I woke my parents up and said, ‘Hey, the war is over!’ “ recalls Hal. “They said, ‘Go to bed –- you’re dreaming,’ “

In 1950, Hal passed his Advanced Class ham radio exam and receiver the FCC callsign, W8FNH. In the summer of 1952, Hal was in the Navy. He got a letter from his dad, who noted his new General class callsign: W8LEZ.

“It surprised me –- I didn’t even know he was doing it,” Hal recalls.

By summer of 1953, Hal was stationed with the Navy in southern California. His parents drove from Michigan to visit, and his dad contacted him from the car using his mobile Multi-Elmac rig. That fall, the weekly Lowell Ledger featured Harold and Hal as the only father-son ham radio duo the paper knew of in the area.

When I knew him, Harold was a tax accountant, keeping the books for private people and big businesses in the area. But he was also an expert photographer. One spring day before I left for a summer as an exchange student in Germany, Harold took me and his Exakta camera into his backyard and instructed me in the basics of photography: The lower the f-stop, the bigger the aperture and the greater the light that reaches the film. The lower the f-stop reading, the less depth of field, and so on. I still recall those lessons today when I take pictures.

Turns out that Harold and Alma moved to Chicago during the Depression and opened Sunnyside Studio. They did portraits, shot weddings and had a booming mail-order film developing business. But on weekends, his dad would disappear, said Hal. He played trumpet with the big bands in Chicago. I recall that in Lowell when I knew him, Harold was still playing trumpet on weekends in a group called The Nomads.

Like his dad, Hal found a Central Sideband Slicer for his 75A-1. The father-son duo had duplicate receiving systems. Hal’s transmitter was a phasing rig he built. It was similar to a Central 20-A, except that it drove a pair of 4CX-300-As to better than a kilowatt.

I’d wondered about that AM transmitter Harold was using on my first visit to his shack. It was a 100-watter with 829B final amplifier. Hal built it when he was in the Navy.

Harold replaced the 829B rig in the 1960s. The new transmitter was a Heath Marauder sideband transmitter. By the 1970s, Harold was tired of the Marauder’s regular breakdowns. He bought a Yaesu FT-101-E transceiver, but was so attached to the 75A-1 that he devised a way to use the Yaesu as a transmitter while receiving on the 75A-1/Slicer.

After his dad’s death, Hal recalls selling the 829B rig and his homebrew sideband transmitter to a Lowell police officer. He couldn’t recall the guy’s name. I considered running an ad in the Lowell Ledger newspaper: WANTED: radio equipment formerly belonging to Harold Collins, W8LEZ. On a Christmas 2001 visit to my parents’ home in Lowell, my mother showed me an article in the Grand Rapids Press about a student ham radio club at Lowell High School. It was organized by the high school security director, Al Eckman, WW8WW. I remembered Al – he was Lowell High School class of ’60, three years ahead of me. And I remembered that Al had been a cop in Lowell.

“I bought that equipment,” said Al when I phoned him. “But I sold it.”

Many of us collectors try to recreate our early stations or stations of mentors like Harold Collins. Seldom do we find the actual artifact –- we simply find similar rigs. They’re stand-ins, but we make do.

Now I can recreate part of the first ham station I ever saw. I have Harold’s receiver –- the same receiver he used, not just a duplicate.

What about a transmitter?

I don’t have a 32V to go with it, but I could use my Johnson Viking II, my Heath DX-100, or my Johnson Invader 2000. Or maybe a Central 100-V or Hallicrafters HT-32-B. Or, hey, a rare Hallicrafters HT-20. All roughly contemporary with the 75A-1.

All surrogates, I’m afraid.

But wait! It once seemed implausible, but today Harold’s 75A-1, the radio I most wanted to find, is now in my shack. What if …

Has anybody seen a 100-watt AM transmitter?

It would be a homebrew rig. Rack-mounted.

With an 829B final.