Robert Bruninga

Robert Ervin Bruninga (April 27, 1948 – February 7, 2022), better known as Bob Bruninga or by his amateur radio callsign WB4APR, was an American engineer, inventor, and activist. Bruninga's interests were diverse, but in his own view, inextricably interrelated. Audiences expecting to learn about satellite engineering or packet radio often found themselves the recipients of impassioned lectures on solar power, climate change, or electric vehicle engineering; or vice-versa. Although Bruninga was thus known to different constituencies for different innovations, he is most famous for developing the Automatic Packet Reporting System, or APRS, a globally-popular digital radio protocol used for real-time communication of formatted data. His advances in digital amateur radio communications are central to his career, and much of his other work was driven by that interest. In addition to creating APRS, Bruninga was a licensed professional engineer, a private pilot, a commander in the US Navy, launched nine satellite missions between 2001 and 2018, and was an indefatigable proponent of sustainable energy independence and electric vehicles.

Biography

Early life Bruninga was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1948. In 1949, his family moved to Florence, Alabama, where he grew up, building amateur radio kits and graduating from Coffee High School in 1966. He spent much of his youth in the wilds of northwest Alabama, becoming an Eagle Scout in the process, and developing a lifelong passion for protection of the natural environment. Upon graduation with honors, Bruninga was commissioned as an ensign in the US Navy, and immediately proceeded to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1971. The next twenty years of his naval career was spent switching between practical radio engineering and academic work. In 1971-1972, he was an electronics officer on the USNS Observation Island AG-154, stationed in Pearl Harbor, working on instrumentation and telemetry related to the Navy's submarine-launched Fleet Ballistic Missile system. In the latter part of 1972 and 1973, he was stationed in Sasebo, Japan, attached as an electronics officer to the command staff of Service Group Three, which would shortly thereafter be renamed Naval Surface Group Western Pacific.

In 1974 and 1975, he was transferred to Brooklyn, New York, with the rank of Ship Superintendent in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Supervisor of Ships, which allowed him to take a two-year postgraduate research position at the Polytechnic Institute New York. In 1976 and 1977, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he did further postgraduate research at George Washington University while stationed at the Defense Command Engineering Center in Reston, Virginia. Having concluded his studies, he was promoted to Program Manager at the Naval Sea Systems Command, still in the Washington D.C. area. 1980 saw a return to Yokosuka, Japan, as the electronics officer of the USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19), which had just been designated the new flagship of the Seventh Fleet. In this four-year posting, he was responsible for providing command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) support to the commander and staff of the United States Seventh Fleet, and he enjoyed a steady series of promotions.

In 1983, he was given an academic posting as chair of the electrical engineering department in Maury Hall of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Here, he was promoted to his final rank, Commander, in 1984, and met his fellow professor Carol Elise Albert, whom he would marry the following year. In 1985, he was made program manager of the newly-formed Naval Space Command in Dahlgren, Virginia, and he remained in this position until 1988, when he took his final operational duty role as combat system inspector in the Board of Inspection and Survey. During the summers of 1985 and 1986, he also served as a faculty fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. Bruninga retired from active naval duty in 1990, with a brief stint building satellites at Bendix from 1990-1992, before beginning the most notable phase of his career, launching amateur digital radio satellites.

Marriage and children Bruninga was married to Naval Academy astronomy professor Carol Elise Albert on May 4, 1985, and the couple had two children, Elizabeth Ann ("Bethann") Bruninga (WE4APR) and Andrew John ("A.J.") Bruninga (WA4APR). He died on February 7, 2022, from complications of sarcoma and the long-term effects of COVID-19.

Philosophy and activism Bruninga was a lifelong pragmatic environmentalist, advocating for and exemplarizing energy-neutral and carbon-neutral living at a personal level, and energy independence as a national defense policy. Throughout his career, he built and drove solar-powered electric vehicles, and lived in an exclusively solar-powered home.

Commenting on the 2015 proposed rollback of Maryland state greenhouse gas reduction legislation in his roles on the IEEE National Committee on Transportation and Aerospace and the Maryland EV Infrastructure Council, Bob summarized his engineer's outlook on sustainability and environmentalism:

Amateur Radio Research and Development Corporation Bruninga served as the Technical Director of the Amateur Radio Research and Development Corporation (AMRAD), an amateur packet radio association based in McLean, Virginia, from 1975 until his death. He served on the ARRDC's board of directors from 1976-1986, and as its vice president from 1978-1983. He likened AMRAD's Washington, D.C.-area voice repeater to a 1970's-era social network:

Prior to the existence of the GPS system, AMRAD provided communications support for the annual Old Dominion 100 mile endurance run, using packet radio at each checkpoint to beacon digital data objects about arrivals to the next checkpoint along the route, the earliest incarnation of APRS.

RAFT and MARScom (21 December 2006)

RAFT (OSCAR 60) and MARScom, were a pair of 5-inch, 3.5kg cubesats, containing both active radar transponders and passive reflectors. They were designed as a test of the Navy Space Surveillance System and a training exercise for United States Naval Academy electrical engineering students. RAFT contained a 217 MHz transponder for the Navy Space Surveillance System, while MARScom contained 1200bps transponders for the Amateur Satellite Service, the Navy Military Affiliate Radio System, and the Naval Academy's Yard Patrol Craft.

ANDE (21 December 2006)

The Mock ANDE Active (MAA) and Radar Fence Calibration (FCal), also dubbed OSCAR 61 and 62 microsatellites, were launched from the Shuttle payload bay on the STS-116 mission to measure the density and composition of the low Earth orbit (LEO) atmosphere and better predict the movement of objects in orbit. The orbital decay of the satellites was tracked by the MAUI Laser Ranging Tracking Station, and ham radio volunteer ground stations provided telemetry feeds, including temperature and battery life. The satellites were both 50cm diameter spheres, but were constructed of different materials and had different masses, 50kg (OSCAR 61) and 75kg (OSCAR 62) respectively. Observing the positions of the two satellites allowed the measurement of differences in orbital decay associated with geomagnetic activity.

ANDE-2 (2009)

Like the previous RAFT and ANDE experiments, ANDE-2 used pair of similar 50cm spherical aluminum satellites with differing weights, 50kg and 25kg, to measure the density and composition of the earth's atmosphere in the low earth orbit (LEO) altitudes, so as to more accurately predict the drag coefficients of future satellites. The active satellite was named Castor, while the passive one was named Pollux. Like their predecessors, they were marked in alternating black anodized and white painted quadrants, to allow observers to measure rate of rotation.

PSAT (20 May 2015)

PSAT was a successor to the original PCSAT as a repeater in the APRS packet radio satellite network. It operated a 1200bps frequency-modulated APRS digital repeater on 145.825 MHz, and a PSK31 repeater receiving on 28.120 MHz and retransmitting on 435.350 MHz. It operated for more than six years, with its last transmission on 22 December 2021 at 14:40 UTC.

QIKCOM-1 (27 October 2017)

The QIKCOM-1 satellite was another APRS repeater, built on short notice by Bruninga's US Naval Academy students in a single semester to take advantage of the 6 December 2015 launch of the NovaWurks HiSAT SIMPL/Kaber launch. Operational deployment was delayed by more than a year however, due to concerns raised by the Federal Communications Commission that its amateur status was invalid, since it was built by students at a federal government institution. This was eventually reconciled with a new temporary operating license.

QIKCOM-2 (not launched)

The QIKCOM-2 satellite was built, but delayed three times and ultimately not launched, due to the same FCC licensing difficulties that delayed QIKCOM-1, wherein the FCC blocked its use of amateur frequencies because of the federal government association of the US Naval Academy students who built it, requiring that the host launch project also receive NTIA approval, an additional hurdle which host spacecraft operators found untenable. QIKCOM-2 would have been the first APRS satellite to provide DTMF ("Touch Tone") signaling.

PSAT-2 (25 June 2019)

PSAT-2, the successor to the 2015 PSAT, launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy on June 25, 2019. Like its predecessors, it is an APRS repeater, operating on 145.825 MHz, and supports the DTMF signaling that would have been supported by QIKCOM-2, had it made it into space. It is also the first to support text-to-speech synthesis and voice uplink and downlink. Bruninga states that FCC approval for the amateur status of PSAT-2 took three years to complete.

Electric vehicles Bruninga was an indefatigable advocate for the replacement of gasoline vehicles with solar-powered electric vehicles as a means of environmental protection and energy self-sufficiency. He evangelized tirelessly, with an engineer's passion for practical solutions, and was infamous for "bait and switch" lectures which drew in audiences expecting to hear about amateur radio, or satellite communications, but pivoted halfway-through to equally fascinating discourse on electrification and the environment. Bruninga was an advocate of "good enough" solutions which could be widely and immediately deployed at low cost, particularly level-1 (low-amperage) charging of EVs from already-existing electrical outlets in places where they already park, rather than driving them to purpose-built level-2 and level-3 charging stations. From his first "Elect-Reck" Volkswagen-based electric vehicle in 1970, to the end of his life, Bob's electric cars and boats were built to serve the dual purposes of his own transportation, and as existence-proofs, teaching aids in his quest to educate the public.

Published works

Recognition Photo of the plaque honoring Bob Bruninga in Florence, Alabama. In 1998, Bob received the Dayton Hamvention's Technical Excellence Award for his work on APRS, and in 2019, the City of Florence, Alabama inducted Bruninga into their memorial Walk of Honor.