[Ground-station] Frank Brickle, ORI Director and Polymath, SK

[Michelle Thompson]

I have some difficult news to share.

Frank Brickle AB2KT has passed away after a valiant battle with
pancreatic cancer.

He was surrounded and supported by friends and loved ones, and continued to
work and create and contribute until the end. He chose to leave us on his
own terms.

I have known Frank for quite a while. I counted him as a best friend. He
very generously agreed to be a Director of ORI in August of 2023. His
advice on technical, regulatory, and organizational matters was excellent,
tactful, clear, and deeply appreciated. All of us have benefited from his
patient counsel.

Many of you know him from amateur radio, where his contributions ranged
from designing DttSP (leveraged by HPSDR among many other projects) to
Digital Spark Gap (as yet unpublished), a way of exciting all the HF bands
in order to efficiently transmit data in an innovative way. And, plenty in
between! Frank explained polynomial spline modulation, synthetic aperture
radar techniques, double-checked everything on the dumbbell antenna design,
and made numerous suggestions for areas of investigation. He is responsible
for our DUM2024 workshop being a success, which meant turning lemons into
lemonade. That was just his style.

Frank was also an internationally renowned composer and music mentor. Frank
is largely responsible for the technical success of the Organ Donor
project, an artificially intelligent pipe organ project that was
successfully exhibited in the US at Maker Faire, Burning Man, and other
venues. Without his collaboration, Organ Donor would not have existed, and
I would not have been able to serve as a distinguished lecturer for IEEE in
algorithmic music composition, using entropy along with Bayesian statistics
to chart out a definition of beauty as determined by tesselating Galois
fields of octave representations.

We often hear "Together everyone achieves more". Frank lived this. If he
had a fault it was wanting to help everyone, all the time, at the expense
of a more selfish focus.

The only thing he would want to leave behind is inspiration and
encouragement.

-Michelle Thompson
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