Bob Bruninga
Robert Ervin Bruninga, better known as Bob Bruninga or by his amateur radio callsign WB4APR, was an American engineer, inventor, and activist. He was born April 27, 1948 in Birmingham, Alabama, and died February 7, 2022 in Glen Burnie, Maryland. 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.Naval career
A Navy ROTC scholarship paid for Bruninga's Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech where in 1970, his senior project was an electric Volkswagen conversion which he entered in the first MIT/Caltech cross-country Clean Air Car Race, a six-day, 3,600-mile intercollegiate cross-country automobile rally from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Pasadena, California. 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 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 4 May 1985, and the couple had two children, Elizabeth Ann Bruninga and Andrew John Bruninga.Death
On 7 December 2020, Bruninga revealed that he had been diagnosed with sarcoma two weeks after his retirement from the Navy. On 7 February 2022, Bruninga succumbed to the combination of the sarcoma and 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. He was also an inveterate community organizer, bringing together groups of amateur radio enthusiasts to build lasting projects and recurring events, such as Appalachian Trail Golden Packet, a radio relay from Georgia to Maine which has occurred on the third Saturday of each July since 2009.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, 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.