Milford Smith of Greater Media will be honored at the spring NAB when the association presents him with its Radio Engineering Achievement Award.
Oded Bendov is the TV winner.
For 19 years Smith has been VP of radio engineering for Greater Media Inc.; he was an engineering executive before that for First Media Corp. He has worked for Tribune Broadcasting in New York.
In its announcement, NAB stated:
“He has also been a major contributor to industry advisory and standardization activities. He is currently the senior co-chair of the National Radio Systems Committee DAB Subcommittee, a position he has held for nearly a decade, and has been chairman of the NAB Digital Radio Committee, an advisory committee to NAB’s Radio Board of Directors.
“Mr. Smith’s engineering talents and ‘people skills’ are legendary within the radio broadcast engineering community. Long before the industry consolidation of the ‘90’s, he was taking disparate and sometimes dilapidated radio properties and transforming them into engineering showpieces. From the initial pre-purchase evaluation to the purchase itself, to establishing temporary studio facilities to keep the station on the air, to location of new studio/office space, to design and buildout of the new space, to upgrade of the transmission system, he would (and still does) embark upon ambitious consolidation projects, doing a great majority of the work himself,” NAB stated.
“Some of the more exciting and innovative engineering projects tackled by Mr. Smith include the Peachtree Plaza hotel FM transmission system, considered by many for over 20 years to be the finest RF facility in the Atlanta market; the Prudential Center FM transmission system, where he led the effort to design and replace an existing transmission facility for four FM stations while all remained on the air, then some years later adding three more stations without causing disruption to the other facilities; and, the relocation of KLSX in Los Angeles to Mt. Wilson, where he came up with a unique strategy to relocate this station from an inferior site, in the process creating a full-market signal.
“More recently Mr. Smith and his staff at Greater Media have been involved in an ambitious IBOC digital radio buildout; in 2005 Greater Media expect to be the first radio group to have fully converted all their stations to IBOC.”
