AN INVENTIVE MIND

Upon graduation, he took a job with the Geological Survey of Finland, then, in the early 1950s with Aeromagnetic Surveys (AS), a division of Hunting Survey Corp., based in Toronto. While Ronka was there, Hunting won the geophysical industry’s coveted Blue Ribbon award. That honor was bestowed on Hunting for its development of a dual-frequency airborne EM system designed for use on fixed-wing aircraft — a project Ronka spent much of his time developing. This instrument was pioneered by Maunu Puranen, Aarno Kahma and Ronka while at the Geological Survey of Finland. They retained the right to market the system outside the country and did so in Canada under the Ronka name. Eventually they sold an improved system to Hunting.

The instrument operates on the same principle that has spawned a handful of other geophysical instruments. An electric current flows in a loop of wire held above the earth. This induces a current to flow in any conductive material, a mineralized sulphide zone, for example, buried in the earth below the coil. That current can then be detected by a sensitive search coil.

But most of what operates under the principle of EM surveying today came from pioneering work by as, a British multi-national corporation set up in Canada by Doug Kendal after the Second World War. (As later split to become Kenting Earth Sciences and Spar Aerospace.) The objective was to use the new method to map the huge expanse of Precambrian rocks exposed in Canada’s far north. Like a fisherman who would like to be able to look down into the water to see where all the fish are, the geophysicist aims to peer down into the Earth’s crust to see where all the orebodies are.

Working at the Photographic Survey division of as, developing rockets and de-icing devices for the Royal Canadian Air Force’s CF-100 jet fighter, was Alex Herz. In 1955, Herz began working with Ronka on a new helicopter EM system.

The two men struck up a productive working relationship from the start — a relationship that would last to this day. Ronka played the role of engineer and designer while Herz was the hands-on technician who would build anything to prove their theory. Together, they made a formidable team.

“Vaino would say to me: `If it works, it’s my fault; if it doesn’t, it’s your fault,’ ” Herz says. “And in return, I used to say to Vaino: `It’s amazing what a good technician can do to a lousy design.’ ” Herz still runs his own company in Toronto.

For a number of years the two worked at as developing geophysical instruments such as lightweight horizontal loop EM instruments and a scintilometer, all the time using the latest in electronic components. In the early 1950s, Ronka and Herz had incorporated transistors into the instruments they built — before they were used by the Japanese in transistor radios.

In 1959, Ronka left as because, in Herz’s words, “like a lot of things, good ideas spring out of adversity, not out of love.” He engaged in consulting work for Hunting. By using simple and elegant techniques for signal enhancement and noise suppression, Ronka designed the facsimile seismograph instruments which were the forerunners of the well-known Huntec FS-3 engineering refraction seismograph.

Ronka also recognized the discriminating abilities of the human ear, allowing the operator to use earphones to distinguish noise from the measured signal. This technique would be important later in the invention of ground VLF instrumentation.

In 1962, when it came time to incorporate his own company, Ronka naturally asked Herz to join him. (At that time, Herz was working for Litton Industries.) “When Vaino called me to see if I wanted to incorporate with him, I said: `Let me think about it,’ ” recalls Herz. “Thirty seconds later, I said `OK’ — he didn’t have to call a second time.”

He adds: “I won’t say how much money we put together when we formed Geonics because it was an embarrassingly small amount.” The two set up shop in a cramped office above a hot laundromat on Sheppard Avenue East in North York, Ont. So in the hot southern Ontario summer, when the sun was shining and the laundry was going full blast downstairs, the office was stifling hot. Just the right level of adversity for doing creative work, you might say.

One of their customers was Bill Jobin-Bevans, of Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting (now President of Controlled Geophysics). He remembers Ronka’s desk in those years. “It consisted of a door propped up on a filing cabinet on one end and a box of paper towels on the other end. So as the towels got used, his desk took on a distinct tilt.”

This unpretentiousness may be one reason why Ronka and Herz were so successful. “We weren’t greedy or status-conscious,” Herz says, “and we took turns making mistakes. When one of us made a mistake, his attitude was: `well, it’ll be your turn to make a mistake next week.’ We could have become rich on a lot of our ideas, but instead we wanted to have fun. And we did.”

Ronka would come to the office with a new idea practically every day, often branching out into areas outside his specialization. It got to the point were Herz was so bombarded by new ideas that he told Ronka: “please don’t invent anything new — I’m having enough trouble with the inventions we have.”

In all the projects he worked on, Ronka demonstrated an ability to think clearly and practically when solving problems. And Herz’s job was to implement Ronka’s ideas into practical and field-worthy instruments, in essence, giving explorationists the tools required to do their jobs better.

A classic example of Ronka’s clear thinking is his discovery of a technique to utilize VLF radio signals for geophysical surveys. Herz remembers the moment clearly:

“We were up in Bancroft, Ont., with an EM-15 doing a ground EM field test and we started getting a signal that went dit, dit, da, da, da, * * * * like Morse code. Right away, it was apparent to Vaino that it was a low- frequency radio communications broadcast. We knew that these signals could be picked up in the bush, and it was an easy, intuitive leap to knowing how to build an instrument that could detect geological anomalies using this signal.” One prospector who has capitalized on VLF in exploration is Quebec prospector Peter Ferderber. He has said: “After the VLF geophysical technique was invented, I did all the original test work in and around Val d’Or, Que. We went out and tested it and we liked what we were doing, so we kept using it. And of course it’s used today all over the world.”

The model EM-16 VLF EM designed and patented by Ronka went on to become an industry standard in ground VLF instrumentation. It also became a cornerstone in the growth of Geonics as an international manufacturer of geophysical instruments.

Induced polarization (IP) is another area where Ronka has made a mark on the exploration industry. And yet it is not a system with which he is generally associ
ated. The automatic self-potential rejection method he came up with and the receiver Herz built were an improvement over existing equipment being marketed at the time. In fact, it was the first usable ip receiver which really caught on — a major breakthrough both for the method and for Geonics. By building ip receivers for Hunting in the 1950s, Geonics started to turn a profit.

In the early 1960s, Ronka approached Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting with a proposal to develop a unique fixed- wing airborne EM system. This patented “zero gradient” system, which was to become the model EM-30, was jointly developed by Hudbay and Geonics. The EM-30 system is credited with the discovery of Hudbay’s Namew Lake nickel mine, which went into productio n in 1988.

In the mid-1960s, Geonics expanded its facilities by moving to Thorncliff Park, near Toronto. The company enjoys a solid international reputation in the specialized field of EM instrumentation and has branched out into inductive resistivity and ground transient EM.

A mild heart attack in 1973 told Ronka it was time to retire. He still acts as a consultant (he spent six months in India helping design geophysical equipment) but not nearly as often as he would were he based in Toronto. That’s one of the main reasons he lives in British Columbia. Having made his mark, Ronka is now terribly busy avoiding work.

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