Anthony “Tony” J. Monteiro, AA2TX (SK)
AMSAT VP-Engineering and Board Member Anthony J. Monteiro, AA2TX of North Andover, MA died on Wednesday morning, March 26, 2014 while
hospitalized in Boston, MA from cancer. He was 55. He is survived by his wife, Mary Lou and daughter, Veronica, a college freshman.
Tony was first licensed in 1973 as a Novice and subsequently held an Extra Class Amateur Radio License. An avid operator, he described his
first contact in an AMSAT BoD Candidate’s Statement in 2011: “I earned my novice ticket in 1973 and made my first ham radio contact with a
transmitter made from parts out of an old TV set. A Heathkit HR-10B receiver and a 65-foot piece of wire strung out of a window for an antenna made up the rest of my station, which was pretty modest even by 1973 standards! Even so, I will never forget the thrill of my very first contact.”
His interest in amateur radio and electronics led him to earn a BS
in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University and a MS in Com-
puter Science from Stanford University. His professional career
started at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey developing network man-
agement systems and then consumer products. After working at several
startup companies, Tony landed at Cisco Systems where he managed
the development of ADSL, voice over packet, and content networking
products. He retired from industry in 2002 and focused his efforts
working on satellite projects.
Tony joined AMSAT in 1994 and started working the satellites. He
earned ARRL VHF/UHF Century Club-Satellite #58 and worked 49 states
(only Hawaii was not logged) as well. Tony worked a number of stations
while he commuted along the I-495 corridor outside Boston. Many will
remember working him through AO-40 as he utilized his “cardboard
box horn antenna.” Tony led a workshop at the 2003 AMSAT Space
Symposium where students built similar antennas, demonstrating the
ease in which one could build a 2.4 GHz S-band antenna to receive
the AO-40 downlink.
Additional technical contributions to the amateur satellite com-
munity that Tony made included “InstantTune Automatic Radio Tuning”
software, “A Simple Desense Filter for Echo”, and several extremely
low cost projects such as “A $5 Mode V/S Adapter using a Sub-Harmonic
Mixer”. AMSAT-UK currently offers a 70 CM Parasitic Lindenblad antenna
based upon his design.
Tony also played a significant role in space-based hardware develop-
ment. He collaborated on the NO-60 satellite. As AMSAT’s VP-Engineer-
ing, he served as the software designer for the SDX (Software Defined
Transponder) on ARISSat-1/Kedr that was deployed from the Inter-
national Space Station by Russian Cosmonauts during a space walk in
August 2011. Tony led the Fox-1 Engineering Team from inception in
2009 and led AMSAT’s efforts to apply for acceptance of Fox-1 in
the NASA Education Launch of NanoSat (ELaNA) in 2011 and Fox-1B in
2012. He established relationships with several universities to
secure scientific payloads for Fox-1 and Fox-1B, including student
experiments.
A strong proponent of student involvement in satellite projects,
Tony served as coordinator of AMSAT Engineering relationships with
SUNY-Binghamton, Penn State-Erie, Virginia Tech, and Rochester
Institute of Technology where students developed new technologies
to be applied in future AMSAT spacecraft as “Capstone” projects.
These projects, such as the development of storage capacitors to
replace batteries developed by SUNY-Binghamton, provided student
experiences that will ultimately be flown in space. The AMSAT
JOURNAL in recent years featured several articles concerning these
projects.
Tony was elected to the AMSAT Board of Directors in 2011 following
service for one year as a BoD alternate. Him wise counsel and focus
on finding ways to make it affordable for AMSAT to fly amateur radio
systems in space resulted in several innovative approaches. It was
Tony that convinced the NASA ELaNA program to modify their qualifi-
cation criteria to add “not for profits” to those that could apply
for launch grants. It was Tony that met with universities that were
looking for ways to fly their payloads but didn’t have the experience
to build satellites, encouraging collaboration that would benefit
both AMSAT and the university.
Tony’s approach to participation in the AMSAT Leadership Team reflect-
ed his approach to life. Whenever he had a thought to share with the
entire AMSAT Board of Directors and/or Senior Officers via e-mail, he
always started with “Dear Friends”. As AMSAT VP-Operations Drew Glas-
brenner, KO4MA noted, “I always admired how he reminded me we were
all friends despite whatever argument was raging.”
Arrangements for a service for Tony have been announced. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to:
Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT), 850 Sligo Avenue, Suite 600,
Silver Spring, MD 20910.
Barry A. Baines, WD4ASW
President-Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT)