In a special AMSAT Board of Directors meeting held via GoToMeeting on Tuesday, April 1st, the board unanimously approved the selection of Jerry Buxton, N0JY of Granbury, TX as AMSAT VP-Engineering. Jerry replaces Tony Monteiro, AA2TX who passed away on March 26th.
Given the significance of completing Fox-1 for delivery on time later this year, the Board recognized that the Fox Program must continue under leadership that is focused on completing AMSAT’s latest satellite. Selecting a new VP-Engineering is an important step towards maintaining the momentum that was developed under Tony’s leadership and to avoid creating an engineering leadership vacuum as work continues on the satellite. The Engineering Team deserves to have the new leadership identified in order to be in position to make the appropriate engineering decisions.
AMSAT President Barry Baines, WD4ASW notes, “Jerry is well qualified to become our new VP-Engineering. His overall knowledge of the Fox-1 program as Systems Engineer under Tony Monteiro coupled with his professional experience in managing complex technical projects will put AMSAT’s engineering programs in good hands. Just as important, his management experience and ability to lead engineering teams is critical as our volunteers work hard to deliver the satellite to Cal Poly later this year.”
Jerry has been involved with the AMSAT Fox-1 Project as Systems Engineer since October 2010. Recently retired following a 39 year career with Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway, he spent the last 13 years of his career working with the railroad’s train dispatching systems. These systems are used to control train traffic over approximately 32,000 miles of track, in a manner similar to air traffic control. Jerry served as project manager as well as participating in the design and development of safety-critical train routing and movement instruction systems, and positive train separation technology. He successfully implemented several mission critical systems in his role as Senior Manager, Network Control Systems and was awarded “Employee of the Year” along with others involved in the Train Management and Dispatch System Project, in 2006.
Jerry became involved in amateur radio satellites with AO-7 and joined AMSAT in April 1983. He currently holds an Extra Class License and is also licensed in Colombia, S.A. as HK5JY. An active amateur, Jerry was number 3 in the world for the number of telemetry frames copied from ARISSat-1. He is also active on terrestrial HF through 1.2 GHz.
“My promotion to Vice President, Engineering is both a humbling honor and a great challenge”, notes Jerry. “Tony did much of the work and built an excellent Team of hard working volunteers to design and build AMSAT-NA’s first CubeSat. I have every confidence that the Fox-1 Team will complete and deliver a reliable satellite that will reflect well on Tony’s legacy.”
The March/April issue of AMSAT JOURNAL will have more information concerning AMSAT’s new VP-Engineering.