Peter Vogel’s Tech Wise
Kent Johansen at the monitoring console for Earthquake Early Warning BC, which he helped design. The system is in use at Vancouver Catholic schools and provides warning of oncoming earthquake waves. (Brent Hayden photo)
Two weeks ago I lost a dear friend, to a rare form of cancer.
Although I had only known Kent Johansen for a handful of years, he had become such an inspiration to me.
Simply put, Kent was the most brilliant person I ever met (and I’ve met a few Nobel Prize winners over the years).
As I write this I am sitting at a computer surrounded by gear that Kent either gave me or inspired me to get. This particular computer is set up to pull in signals from passing weather satellites and turn them into glorious images, which I then post in various places for others to see.
When you met Kent you never knew where the conversation might lead, but you could be sure you were going to learn something you’d never heard of before. So it was that I came to learn about software-defined radio (SDR), and a host of other topics, some of which I’ve written about in this space previously.
Every time I was with my friend I learned something novel, usually about a completely new field of technology or physics. He enjoyed off-the-cuff calculations. I remember him looking at a particularly large towering cloud and quickly estimating its mass in terms of water vapour.
Kent was only 57 when he passed away. When I first met him he had just designed the key components for what became Earthquake Early Warning British Columbia (EEWBC). It was through this project that we became friends. When an earthquake was felt here not long after, I wrote him out of the blue to see if he might send me some data. That data arrived very soon after, and I massaged it into a graph that subsequently featured in a CBC-TV news story a day or two later.
From that point on we became good friends, Kent always inspiring me to explore new areas. When he first handed me a thumb-sized SDR, I spent almost a year just looking at it before realizing just some of its amazing capabilities.
EEWBC provides special protection for students and teachers of the Catholic Independent Schools of the Vancouver Archdiocese (CISVA) through a network of sensors, called Tetras, invented by my friend. These sensors are buried beneath the grounds of our CISVA schools, continuously feeding motion data, every quarter of a second, to a computer system operated by the University of British Columbia’s engineering department. The beauty of this network is that it can provide tens of seconds to possibly minutes of warning of pending damaging earthquake waves through automated alarms in our schools.
Kent Johansen being interviewed by CBC-TV.
The two photos accompanying this column capture the essence of my friend Kent Johansen, in one surrounded by gear that he worked with every day, in the other being interviewed on CBC-TV about the system in our schools and wearing a shirt from my long-running Physics Balsa Bridge Building Contest.
It was so special to be able to spend time with Kent these past few months, at home, at the hospital, and most recently at the hospice, where his family, and especially his wife, Elaine Thompson Johansen, provided such extraordinary care for him.
In the words of Carlos Ventura, professor and director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Facility at UBC, we are going to miss, in Kent, a very good friend and an outstanding scientist.
Yes, Kent, I shall miss you very much. Rest assured your work and friendship live on in every weather satellite image I download and post, every ham radio contact I make, and in the myriad other projects you have inspired me to pursue. I still hope to make a meteor scatter radio contact one of these days, something you described to me when we first met. Talk about reaching for the stars!
Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).