Adapted by Laval Desbiens - September 2009

With thanks to Ron Powers

 

Samuel (Ross) Ritchie of Almonte, Ont. passed away on Friday September 11, 2009 at age 76 , leaving his wife Ghislaine, Lucy, Rita, Mark and Karen.

 

Ron Powers remembers Ross from his early years at the Almonte Monitoring station in 1965, Ross having been there a little before 1965. He was a radio inspector at the Kenora field office for about a year and a half around 1973 but he preferred and returned to Almonte.

 

When the station ceased operation, he transferred to the Radio Regulations Lab on Clyde Avenue from where he retired. He was a fine person, a good friend and an active radio amateur VE3DIW.

 

Ross was with me at the Air Services Training School in the early sixties when the school was at the Ottawa airport.

 

It was the first monitoring course given by Frank Grant and Art Bambrick, two old timers in that business.

 

Using General Radio frequency measuring equipment, we were training our 'musical ears' zero beating the station with a transfer oscillator, then beating that signal with a harmonic of the frequency standard to measure the difference from it on an interpolation oscillators , stopping the Lissajous figure on the scope to complete the operation.

 

One had to be quick about it for the tranmissions were not always 'long winded' and the transfer oscillators were not rock solid. Quite a different and more involved operation than the way its done today,

 

I have good memories of him, always with a smile on his face.

 

Laval, September 2009

 

 

Ross and I worked together with the monitoring vehicles and he helped me to transfer Mark I to Winnipeg!  He always had a smile on his face and loved working with me, getting the vehicles ready for each monitoring season.  He would go out yearly to collect 5 days of monitoring data for multiple sites across Canada before we transferred Mark I, II, III and IV where radio frequency was more of a congestion issue and before ISOCs.

John Kluver

27 July 2015