The 2009–2010 SBE Educator of the Year Award will be presented to Charles “Buc” Fitch, P.E., CPBE, AMD.
Fitch, a long-time Radio World columnist, was nominated for his 40-year-plus contributions to educating the industry through articles, presentations and mentoring work, not only in mainstream technical areas of broadcasting but also important adjacent technologies such as NEC, project management and collateral regulations.
Buc’s newest column for Radio World, “Certification Corner,” is aimed at helping readers understand and prepare for the SBE certification exams.
In another column, “Milestones,” he looks back and reflects on important technological achievements in communications on both the broadcast and consumer sides.
He has written on such diverse topics as the Marti RPU receiver and the proliferation of early automobile radio receivers. In one stretch he profiled several 1 kW transmitter models that helped change the industry. An important part of his past writings is a lengthy series on the National Electrical Code (NEC), which earned recognition from the SBE in 2002 for best article series.
Buc has been an SBE member since 1975 and certified since 1976 (#202). Among his special credentials related to broadcasting, he is a Senior Member as well as a Certified Professional Broadcast Engineer (Life) with AM Directional Antenna sub-certification from SBE.
He also is a Registered Professional Engineer in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and a licensed electrical contractor in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Since 1987 Fitch has been a consulting engineer in private practice focusing mainly on communications system design, project management and FCC allocations. Prior to this he built, owned and operated several radio stations for himself.
In the early 1980s he was director of engineering of Arch Broadcasting, building Channel 61 in Hartford, Conn. Shortly thereafter he repeated this effort building Channel 66 in Boston, which was the flagship station of the Home Shopping TV group.
For the fast-track construction of these two major-market TV stations, the first built from the ground up for TV stereo and 24/7 operation, he was nominated for NAB’s engineering award in 1986.
Buc was the professional engineer in charge of the “Evening Magazine” project at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s (now CBS) KYW in Philadelphia, developing the remote pickup microwave systems and two-way radio backbone to do this TV show live from location. For this effort he was nominated for an Emmy in 1983.
Before that Fitch was the chief video engineer and a communications design engineer for the international energy firm and shipbuilding company, Sun Oil. The Sun Philadelphia office designed and implemented the telecommunications (radio and telco) and TV production needs of this company worldwide. Prior, he was a project design engineer, working in TV production trailers such as are used for NFL games, at RCA and staff engineer at New Jersey Public Broadcasting during the building of the original four TV station network.
