[SCCC] W6VPH SK

[Michael Tope]

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: 
(https://jplarc.org/newsletters/1996/feb/feb96.html). 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

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