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Completed Careers
Don Heirman, Associate Editor
Since the printing of the Winter 2010 issue of the EMC
Newsletter, it saddens me to report that Doug Robertson
passed away. Many thanks to Hugh Denny who
provided the following tribute to Doug.
I would like to continue to solicit your support in helping
me receive the names of EMC Society members that have
recently passed away. You can either forward them directly
to your local Chapter chair, or if you don’t know who that
Doug Robertson, age 85, completed his
career on February 18, 2010. Born a “small
town boy” in Crawford, Georgia in 1924,
Doug left home in 1941 to attend radar school
and then joined the US Army Air Forces,
where he performed early radar research and
repair during WWII. After the war, he
entered Georgia Tech where he earned a
degree in Electrical Engineering and subsequently
joined the Engineering Experiment
Station (EES) at Georgia Tech, which is now
the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He
retired from GTRI as the Director of the Electronics
Technology Laboratory in 1982.
His early research was focused on deter- Doug Robertson
mining the characteristics of crystal resonators
and on the development of VHF crystal controlled oscillators.
He subsequently led an effort to develop an articulation scoring
machine for evaluating the performance of voice communication
systems in the presence of noise and interference. He became the
Director of the Communications Division of EES in 1962. Under
his leadership, electromagnetic interference research expanded
markedly. A program for the US Army Signal Corp developed the
EMI measurement techniques for determining the spectrum signatures
of communications equipment. Initially aimed at AM and
FM voice communications systems, follow-on efforts expanded
is, you can forward the names to me (d.heirman@ieee.org)
or a member of the Completed Careers Committee directly,
including Bruce Archambeault, Don Sweeney, and Andy
Drozd. See page 3 of this Newsletter or the EMC Society
website (www.emcs.org) for contact information of these
committee members.
Thank you in advance for your assistance as we honor
EMC Society members who have completed their careers.
the techniques to handle PCM and microwave
equipment. The results of this program
were incorporated into the original
MIL-STD-449. Many of the measurement
practices were later incorporated into early
variations of the MIL-STD-460 family as
well. Several innovations in screen room
measurements to include hooded antenna
and compact antennas were also developed
during this period.
In addition to being a charter member
of the IRE Professional Group on Radio
Frequency Interference, he encouraged
and fostered staff support of IEEE EMC
Society activities which included organizing
and hosting the 1978, 1988 and 1995
EMC Symposia in Atlanta. His mentoring, moral and financial
support of the EMC Society culminated in three members of his
staff being elected to the Board of Directors (James C. Toler, Don
Clark and Hugh Denny), two members elected as President of
the Society (James C. Toler and Don Clark), and three GTRI
faculty being named IEEE Fellows from the EMC Society (James
C. Toler, Don Clark and Hugh Denny).
The EMC Society is deeply indebted to the foresight and efforts
of EMC pioneers such as Doug Robertson and his peers.
EMC