[Ground-station] Wally Ritchie WU1Y - SK

[Michelle Thompson]

Wally Ritchie WU1Y - SK

It's never easy to share bad news about a significant loss.

Wally Ritchie WU1Y passed away in Florida on 1 July 2021 from heart
failure.

We have lost a big part of our team. I, and I know many of you, join his
friends and family in mourning his passing.

While he defeated cancer with the same energy and style that he overcame so
many other daunting challenges in his life, he was unable to recover from a
series of setbacks that began in late May and worsened in late June.

Wally was our Primary Investigator for the Phase 4 transponder project, is
a primary contributor to the documentation, design, fundraising, and grant
process for the transponder, and was responsible for the specification and
vision of Remote Labs. He defended, mentored, and supported the team and
Open Research Institute work on numerous occasions. He was a true subject
matter expert in space and terrestrial digital communications, was an
experienced manager, and a talented entrepreneur. He lived and traveled
internationally, was well read, and never failed to provide real backbone
exactly when and where it was needed.

Professionally, Wally was a Principal Engineer. He had extensive experience
in systems engineering and firmware development. He was an expert in
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). He held several high-level
manufacturing and management positions during his career, and knew digital
signal processing in depth. He was devoted to education and improving
student accessibility to high technology.

I met Wally through Jonathan Brandenburg at the 2016 TAPR DCC. We hit it
off instantly. We had a lot in common. Wally had repeatedly attempted to
volunteer through AMSAT and had not gotten a positive response. He was
thrilled to find out that people were working on the problems that he
thought were important for amateur satellites, and he dug in and selflessly
volunteered from that day forward. Our collaboration extended to open
source medical devices, regulatory work, a variety of grant applications,
and some attempts at some really fun proprietary ventures. I met his wife
Debbie and his son Keegan.

He did presentations, volunteered at the HamCation booth, and organized
several workshops. He led design reviews and wrote papers whenever they
were needed. He did whatever I asked and always let me know when I was
doing a good job, or where I could improve.

I learned so much from him and will miss him very much.

While it's not possible to "replace" someone like Wally, we will keep going
with the same spirit. He had great confidence in our ability to achieve our
goals. I'm not inclined to let him down.

-Michelle W5NYV
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