John Hamel - Founder

John Hamel the founder and owner of HamelTronics has spent the vast majority of his life in the Sarasota area. For many Sarasotan’s the “Hamel” name is a familiar one. The Hamel family established roots in Sarasota in 1960. Chaplain J.D. Hamel Park located in downtown Sarasota was named after John’s father, Reverend J.D. Hamel who for 28 years was the Senior Pastor of The First Brethren Church.

John got his start in the telecommunications business in the early 1970’s first working with some well known radio stations then moving on to management positions in county government. His resume includes Assistant Chief Engineer with WQSA/WQSR radio, Chief Engineer at WKZM Radio, Service Supervisor at Goff Communications and Service Manager at Manatee County Telecommunications.

In 1984 John was a founding partner at Intrac Communications a Motorola service company which specialized in public safety communications. Motorola subsequently purchased Intrac in 1989 keeping John on board to manage Motorola’s Sarasota, Tampa and Lakeland Operations.

In 1996 Motorola made a decision to turn the vast majority of their service work over to outside companies rather than continuing to support it internally. John saw this as an opportunity to get back into his own business and with some partners founded Wireless Technology, a leading sales and service organization which supported Motorola communications products in a ten county area throughout Florida.

As the capability of wireless equipment evolved John saw an opportunity to start delivering high capacity, high speed internet to business and residential customers in areas where the current providers were either not available or cost prohibitive. In a very short time the wireless internet service provider or WISP business was several hundred strong and growing at Wireless Technologies.

John, seeing wireless internet as the future purchased the internet portion of the business from Wireless Technology in mid 2006 and HamelTronics was born. In less than a year the entire network was ugraded with significant investments being made in infrastructure, and management technologies. These improvements have expanded not only the service area but also vastly increased the speed of the entire network and the quality of service available to all customers. HamelTronics prides itself in offering extremely high speed internet connectivity at affordable prices.