[SCCC] W6VPH SK

[Michael S. Mitchell W6RW]

Bud was one of my heroes when I was a teenage ham. He had a 7 element wide spaced 20 meter yagi at his San Gabriel Valley home. It would hang over the Interstate 10 when it was pointed in certain directions. In those days, a pure DXer only had a 20 meter antenna. There was no 5 Band DXCC or Challenge. When I was stationed in Italy when I was in the Navy operating the club station I1DFA, the blower motors on his amp would wipe out the pile up. He was really LOUD
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Tope <W4EF at dellroy.com>
Sent: Jun 30, 2024 12:58 AM
To: reflector SCCC <sccc at contesting.com>
Subject: [SCCC] W6VPH SK

I am saddened to report that Bud Ansley, W6VPH lost his long battle with Alzheimer's disease on June 19, 2024. I first met Bud when I started working in the Communications Ground System Section of JPL in 1997. Bud was an R&D technician who built RF equipment used in NASA's Deep Space Network as well as occasional prototypes for spaceflight hardware.

Bud loved to talk about his contesting and DX exploits and I spent many a lunch hour in his lab talking with him about all things real ham radio. These included Bud's operations from various HF super-stations such as Dr Phil Coussen WA6ZZK's QTH in Lancaster and Jack Hachten W6TSW's high mesa QTH in Anza. Circa 1990 Bud built a 13 element 20 meter Yagi designed by Dan Bathker K6BLG at Hachten's Anza QTH. It was fixed at 15 degrees north for working Europe short path. A short article on this monster antenna along with a photo of Bud on one of the towers that supported it can be found here: (). There is also an article on this antenna in the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (unfortunately it is behind a paywall): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/88217/authors#authors (https://jplarc.org/newsletters/1996/feb/feb96.html)

In addition to his many exploits on HF, Bud was an avid satellite and EME operator. On his small lot in Monrovia he had a fairly large EME array. If I remember correctly it was a pair of very long-boom 2 meter Yagis stacked horizontally along with four large 70CM yagis in an H-frame all on a common AZ-EL rotator. Bud also enjoyed building homebrew amplifiers for both HF, VHF, and UHF and from what I understand some of these amplifiers (in the style of the time he came up in) had considerable headroom 🙂. In addition to working many DXCC entities on satellite, Bud traveled to Haiti as a guest of Dan HH2MC to put HH on satellite.

Bud was a veteran of the US Navy. Services will be held at 10:30 AM on Monday July 8th at the Riverside National Cemetery.

73, Mike W4EF






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