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George(Guerino) A. Lucchi Phoenix, AZ QCWA # 22777 |
George Lucchi age 98, of Phoenix, AZ passed away on September 15, 2014. He was born on January 22, 1916 in Epping, New Hampshire. George was interned at the Phoenix, AZ National Cemetery with full Military Honors.
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A NOBEL LIFE
GEORGE (GUERINO) ANGELO LUCCHI W6NVN
JANUARY 22, 1916 - SEPTEMBER 15, 2014
George Lucchi´s parents were Northern Italian immigrants who arrived in the U.S during 1911 at Boston, MA. He was born in Epping, NH in 1916 where his father worked at a brick factory. In 1926 he moved to Antioch, California. By then he could speak English in addition to an Italian dialect of Northern Italy. His first ham radio receiver was a single tube, broadcast channel radio receiver which he built at 8 years old with the help of an Italian boarder who he called Scapooch who had recently come to the US. Scapooch had been educated at the Marconi Radio School in Bologna, Italy. This was the start of his interest in ham radio. A radio they built is in the Marconi Museum.
After moving to Antioch, CA he continued with school until the second year of high school. He had to quit school to help support the family and at that point was employed in construction work. He used the skills he learned through out his life and was an excellent brick layer, stone mason, wood worker and even dug a rather large and deep swimming pool in his yard with a shovel and then designed the sand gravel system to filter it. Schooling continued via correspondence and night school in order for him to obtain his high school diploma. He became friends with some ham operators in Antioch and by 1928 constructed a 3-tube Amateur Radio band receiver with their guidance. He constructed a self-excited 801 tube transmitter running about 40 watts. In 1936 he obtained his first Amateur Radio license and went by the call sign of W6NVN. He operated only CW and by 1939, added a 1 KW rig with a Taylor 200 final. A 400-ft-end-fed Zepp was his antenna. He received his first WAC certificate from The International Amateur Radio Union in 1939.
On December 18, 1941, he went to the Federal Building in San Francisco to enlist in the U.S. Navy with the hopes that his ability to type 65 WPM and send and receive Morse Code at 35 WPM would allow him to become a naval radio operator. Instead the Navy recruiters set him down the hall to talk to the U.S. Coast Guard. They were looking for radio operators since they took over all the commercial shore marine radio operations. After boot camp in the CG and a month at their Westport, WA Lifeboat Station, he was taken to the Primary Radio Station for the Coast Guard in the Northwest where he was immediately put on a point-to-point Westport to Ketchikan, Alaska net. He was an Apprentice Seaman at the time while the other radio operators were either First Class or Chiefs. The Chief at the station was a ham radio operator so he got along well with him and due to his experience building ham rigs, he soon performed all of the maintenance of the 5 transmitters and receivers on four positions. They guarded the 500 KC at each position and had a low frequency transmitter on 500 kHZ which developed an 5 KW output. It wasn´t long before he was made a Radioman 3RD class, promoted to 1ST class and finally Chief Radioman. By 1944, when the SPARS (Women reserves of the Coast Guard) relieved the radio operators on most shore stations, he wanted to be transferred to a ship in the South Pacific. He posted to the AKA-16, USS AQUARIUS at Seattle, WA as Chief Radioman. He went to such places as the Philippines, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Okinawa and finally occupation of Japan at Nagasaki. He arrived just 2 weeks after the bomb and experienced illness from the radiation. Just after the war the ship made two trips to Hong Kong to carry Chiang Kai-shek troops and supplies to North China, the first trip uploading at Tsingtao and the second trip to Ching Wang Tao. By the year end he had traveled to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to decommission the ship. He spent 6 months on the USCG Cahoon, a 125 ft CG cutter operating out of San Francisco, and then a few months out of the CG facility at Alameda before retiring from the CG in 1947.
During 1947 and 1951, he was a CAA radio operator at Wake Island and Honolulu. While on Wake Island, he used his skill as a photographer to photograph and develop black and whites of President Truman and General MacArthur. Many photos you see today in all forms of media were taken by him using his Leica camera and it was only a few years ago personnel on Wake Island removed the photos from display. Because of the historical nature of the meeting he had the foresight to send the President and General a copy of one of the photographs which they autographed and returned individually.
He was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley in 1951, receiving a Bachelor of Science Degree in 1955. He was hired by RCA at their Los Angeles, CA facility working on a secret radar program which was planned to be used to guide the BOMARC (Boeing and Michigan Aeronautical Research Center) missile flying at low altitude while rejecting ground clutter. (Because the earth is large, the radar illuminated the earth creating "clutter") Because the target would be moving, it´s motion would generate a return frequency higher than the ground clutter signal using filters. About 100 engineers worked on this program and the missile was designed to track and destroy low flying aircraft when operating at either 40k ft. or 60k ft altitude. Its range was over 200 miles, powered by 2 ram jet engines, flew at better than mach 1, and carried an atomic war head.
Three years later he was assigned on the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Waring System) program a high powered long-range radar program under contract by RCA Moorestown to the U.S. government to track possible incoming missiles from Russia. It was the first 1 billion dollar program for electronics developed by the government. His job was to design and produce an operator training system which could be used to train operators using a portion of the radar while it was in normal operation without the operators on duty being aware that the system was being used for that purpose. This way the operators would be at simulated BMEWS controls as though they were operating an on-line system. Vacuum tubes were used as silicon transistors were not yet available. Feed lines to the fixed antennas consisted of pressurized wave guide approximately 2 feet wide and over 12 inches high. The transmitting tubes were four 10 foot Klystrons produced by Eimac and later by RCA. The sites that were fitted with BMEWS were Clear Alaska, Thule Greenland and Shetland Islands. Later RCA outfitted ships in the Indian Ocean and some Pacific Ocean islands and various other places as a result of Sputnik and the threat the Russians could launch missiles via the South pole. At the completion of the program he was assigned as the leader in the RCA Avionics group at West Los Angeles to complete the ATC Transponder program for the FAA. He was the leader on an RCA version of what the U.S. government wanted for their transponder. Next came a Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) program. The commercial airlines already had a heading system, called VOR, but no means for determining distance to a facility other than weather radar, an RCA product. He headed the DME program for RCA and completed the program in about a year. RCA turned out to be a major supplier of DME equipment as a result of his development.
He continued developing weather radar designs at RCA which used low power, were light and, for the first time, used colored displays. The Concord jet housed his AVQ-X weather radar in the nose and the challenge was how to keep it cool at mach speeds, Weather Scout I & II which were fixed wing weather radars used on small single engine aircraft and are now known as Sperry Weather Scout Radar System, the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) carries his weather radar design in it´s nose. The Blackbird spy plane had a detachable drone that flew photographic missions over hostile territories before we had satellites and he designed the guidance system to direct it. They even succeeded in making use of long-life solid state transmitters at the 9GHZ frequency band. Sperry Flight Systems purchased RCA Avionics Systems in 1980 when he was Chief Engineer. Sperry requested that he become their employee so he moved from the San Fernando Valley, CA to Phoenix, AZ in 1982. He left Sperry Flight Systems/Honeywell at the age of 70 in early 1986 to retire although management wanted him to remain indefinitely. Through out his career he was awarded numerous patents, a Merit award and is listed in Who´s Who.
Retirement allowed for some travel, the continued participation in net meetings on the ham radio, swimming, gardening and weight lifting. He took a trip to San Francisco down memory lane and visited all the places he frequented with his wife prior to and during their marriage. He even rode the trolly up to Nob Hill wearing a suit to visit Mark Hopkins Hotel to have a drink at Top Of The Mark and then the Tonga Room for dinner at the Fairmont. The Tiki Bar in the Tonga Room actually still rains real water at various times into the central water feature that was once an indoor terrace swimming pool in the 1940´s where Ronald Reagan and many celebrities were known to take a dip.
CREDITS
Obituary/biography: Beverly Lucchi (Daughter)