The topic of the workshop is Leadership and Management (though not strictly limited to that as you’ll see below). 

We’re excited about the list of speakers!  Check this out:

• Jhani Kaye.  Jhani is a legendary programmer in the LA, having spent years at KOST, KBIG, and most recently KRTH.   He’ll be talking about the relationships (good and bad) between Programming management and Engineering.  

• Mo Khazaal.   Diverting from the broadcasting context a bit, we have Mo Khazaal is a current field Battalion Chief with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, bringing over 27 years of fire service experience. He has extensive expertise in incident command for both structure and wildland fires.  

• Jon Kirchner.  Jon is the CEO of Xperi—a company you need to know about.  Jon will talk about the current state of Xperi’s technology with respect to radio and streaming to your car dashboard.   This is a crucial topic to our industry and this workshop is a great way to gain insight into how well radio can continue to do in the future. 

• Lynn Duke.   Lynn is retired now but for many years successfully ran the Audacy (Entercom/CBS radio before that) engineering department here in LA.   Lynn could write a book on this topic and, since he worked with Jhani Kaye for many years, will likely have some good stories to tell!

• Fred Baumgartner.   Fred is retired now—but knows the business inside and out.  His presentation will be on system reliability—a topic near and dear to our hearts—and how to measure the results.  What does 99% reliability mean vs 99.999% reliability—and how do you justify, in dollars and cents, the difference? 

• Mike Pappas.   Mike is the VP of Business development for Orban.  Let’s hear from the vendor side of the equation! Mike spent years as a broadcast engineer, and his new role gives him a different perspective.

Please join us for an open forum discussion on transmitter site security. How can you keep your site safe and secure? What is being done in other sites? We will be joined by a panel of folks with thoughts and ideas on how to keep you and your equipment safe. Bring your questions and concerns; let's see what we can come up with as a community! 

Our July presentation is put on by Telos Alliance

Eric Bolt from NOAA will present on alerts and warnings.

Our June presenter is Dennis Doty, RF Engineer at NBC/Telemundo. He is responsible for all Mr. Wilson operations and will be discussing how the crazy weather we had this winter affected the site.

With hundreds of transmitter site visits under his belt, Jeff has seen a few things and will attempt to share some of the challenges he encounters most often in this session. The content will cover tips from the areas of grounding and lightning protection, safety, IT security and whatever else comes to mind, so there should be a bit of something for everyone in this fast paced presentation. We’ll look at the problems and situations we all encounter and discuss ways to resolve them or work around them and to prevent them from being situations in the future and have some fun in the process!

Jeff Welton, has worked with Nautel for over 30 years. He is currently the Nautel Sales Manager for U.S. Central Region. Previously he spent 16.5 years as a Nautel Customer Service Technician, was involved in the 2015 MA3 field tests with NAB Labs and has performed hundreds of transmitter site visits and field calls. A regular speaker and contributor on broadcast engineering, Jeff has been recognized with the following awards: the 2020 NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award; 2019 APRE Engineering Achievement Award; and 2018 SBE Educator of the Year Award. He’s also contributed to the most recent edition of the NAB Engineering Handbook and performs several presentations a year in the area of broadcast engineering.