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

[John Ackermann N8UR]

I am so sorry to hear this.  I've known Frank since the very beginning 
days of the original PowerSDR Flex SDR-1000 and his contributions to 
that field were immense.

But the most memorable time I had with him was one evening in the bar at 
a long-ago DCC when I came away convinced I'd been conversing with the 
most broadly-knowledgeable person I'd ever met.  From radio to math to 
literature to The Goon Show to psychoanalysis to, of course, music, he 
could jump from topic to topic, and it was clear (in the nicest possible 
way) that he wasn't faking it.  I really wish I'd had more chances to 
talk with him.

He'll be greatly missed.

John
----

On 2/5/25 15:49, Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station wrote:
> 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 Digital Spark Gap (as yet unpublished), a way of exciting all the HF 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
> 
>