Quick, come up with some great father-and-son combinations.
Sports might come to mind.
Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr. Archie and Peyton (and Eli) Manning. Bobby and Barry Bonds.
In music, talented bassist Nathan East recently put together an album with his keyboardist son, Noah, called “Father Son.”
There’s the psychological angle. If the father was a star in his respective field, does the son emerge from dad’s shadow? Does he march to the beat of his own drum?
But in the best-case scenarios, a father and son in the same room together can display a camaraderie and chemistry that only, well, parenting can provide.
It’s why we in radio and in the broader technological space have become infatuated with each video Joe and Jeff Geerling spawn on YouTube.
Joe, 68, is a longtime radio engineer who tells us he is nearing retirement from his role as chief engineer for Covenant Network.
Son Jeff, 40, is a very accomplished software engineer, longtime blogger and these days, a YouTube influencer.
But as technology grows more and more complex and as our attention spans get shorter and shorter, the Geerlings have managed to find a sweet spot for something that is in demand as ever:
Taking complicated topics and in a short duration making them worth our while.
Roads meet in the Lou
The Geerlings are lifelong St. Louisians.
Their midwest charm comes through on our video call together. Jeff’s style has translated perfectly to his YouTube audience, which has more than one million subscribers.
But a few minutes talking with Joe and you can see why he also goes about his technical explanations so charismatically.
He and his wife, Susan, have let their four children traverse their own paths.
But after running his main channel for a few years, Jeff convinced Joe to appear on camera and launched the Geerling Engineering channel in late 2021. It was a chance for Joe to convey decades of broadcast knowledge into well-packaged videos.
The best part for Jeff? He knows enough to be more than a little dangerous. He just spent a large chunk of last month restoring a GPS time server, after all.
“I view my role like Kevin on This Old House,” Jeff explained. “You’re surrounded by these experts who know everything and I’m the everyman. An engineer might look at a 20-year-old part and shrug it off but I’m the one pointing at it and asking, ‘What does it do? Why is it red hot?'”
Their father-and-son chemistry comes through even over a video call, like taking in a game at Busch Stadium or the Enterprise Center together. The channel is currently 61 videos strong, with 137,000 subscribers.
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And there’s so many other subject areas the duo haven’t covered.
“We have a list of probably 50 or 60 we haven’t gotten to yet,” Jeff said.
But as an influencer, Jeff has to set priorities. And the Geerling Engineering channel is usually third on his list, behind his own and a second tech channel.
“Sometimes it’s hard just to get dad to come out to the studio to record,” Jeff admitted.
But the quality of what the Geerling Engineering channel has already produced stands out.
The beauty of broadcast engineering topics in 2026 is that it can encompass a rather large umbrella. Neat products are a focus of the channel, like a recent video of Jeff prototyping a QuadRF Wi-Fi bot.
“It checked every box,” Jeff explained. “Phased arrays, really cool looking, and now I’ve ordered one because I thought it was so cool.”
But balancing out new gear such as software-defined radios are nuggets of knowledge from Joe’s five-decade journey through the business and the overarching evolution of the industry.
“When I first came into the business, it was all tubes that would drift. The transition to the digital world changed all that,” Joe said.
Playing your game
Of course, surviving on YouTube requires playing the algorithm game. Jeff knows it’s in their best interest to play along.
One example was how the duo presented their video inside the combiner system at St. Louis’ supertower. As we profiled in 2023, the structure hits home for the Geerlings. Starting when Jeff was around six years old, Joe took the boy on numerous visits.
What better way to generate those clicks than brand it as a “1 Million Watt Broadcast Tower”?
“You can just change the title and thumbnail,” Jeff said. “You’re not lying because it is a million watts ERP, which presents its own conversation. It’s not evil to buy a candy bar but the manufacturers are going to have bright packaging because they want you to grab that bright orange packet of peanut butter M&M’s.”
There’s also a timeliness factor.
“With news-related stuff, you have to hit it within a week or two to get views,” Jeff explained. “If you take several weeks to perform a deep dive, you’ll miss your window.”
As a result, Jeff knows to pick and choose his battles. That includes other aggregators. The two might be best known for their “We made a hot dog talk…with RF” video. In that case, it was shared by an account on TikTok.
The TikTok video gained millions of views, but none that will count toward the Geerling channel metrics.
For the Geerlings, does it convert?
“It converts into people recognizing us as the hot dog tower guys!” Jeff said with a laugh.
RF is everywhere
But there are far more positives than negatives. Their videos have drawn in folks who have never thought twice about radio engineering and suddenly have them wondering about the dangers of high-power RF.
Joe has also heard comments that reflect how the videos resonate within the radio engineering community itself.
“Local engineers will shoot me a note about something we talked about,” Joe explained. “And the commenters in the videos are overwhelmingly positive.”
Many showgoers at industry conventions, such as the NAB Show, crave meeting the Geerlings.
Perhaps the topics that work best on the channel are the ones showcasing how the tech and broadcast spaces are merging to keep operations on the air.
Naturally, Jeff’s main YouTube channel covers plenty of fare that doesn’t involve day-to-day radio.
His analysis of AI agents and their effect on open-source software is well worth your time, regardless of your programming expertise.
Still, he has seen too many parallels between the tech sector and radio to ignore them.
“As I got into hardware engineering, bare-metal servers and networking, I realized RF is everywhere,” Jeff said. “If you design a circuit board, it radiates RF. It’s just a matter of how controlled it is and whether you know it’s radiating.”
Joe has lived that digital transition firsthand.
“I saw the audio get digitized, the transmitters got digitized and then you start dreaming that you could digitize everything right up until the last spigot point going out to the tower,” he recalled.
“I started seeing those possibilities and I saw it all as a good thing.”
A changing world
Our conversation shifted to the digital divide.
If running a radio broadcast operation in 2026 really is more of an IT-type task, has the industry fully caught up?
And, if you’ve worked your way through a broadcast plant and gotten it to a good spot, only for everything to reset — with IP-based studio-to-transmitter links, for example, is frustration only natural?
“I loved the continuous changes but I had my moments of resistance,” Joe Geerling recalled. “I had the experience with IP audio where I knew enough about IP systems to know how bad it could go and delayed changing longer than I could have.
But eventually, you see too much benefit to the change and you just have to dive in,” he said.
Still, sometimes the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality has merit.
“Older engineers created extremely reliable systems and know them inside out,” Joe said. “There is a sort of ‘firewall’ that new ideas have to pass through. A proposed very new and radically different system can have a hard time finding a way past.”
But improvements often are incremental, Joe explained, so he believes that changes to working gear or systems should be part of the normal workflow of an engineer.
“You just need to convince someone to pay for it!” Joe added.
The Geerlings also have firsthand experience with early benefits to our technological revolution.
Back in the late 1990s, Joe was market chief engineer for CBS Radio in St. Louis. He enlisted a high-school-aged Jeff to do the background coding for a “now playing” feature on 98.1 KYKY(FM)’s webpage.
“I thought it was the coolest thing ever that you could get the song title,” Jeff recalled. “This was before text or RDS on the radio. I mostly did it because I wanted to see the song so I could write it down and go find the cassette tape for it!”
It was their first official father-son collaboration.
“My only regret is that I learned assembly language and kind of stopped with BASIC and assembly,” Joe joked. “The whole world runs on all these other languages that I’m not familiar enough with to just bang away, make stuff or heavily modify things. I just find the .ini file and see what I can change.”
Joe is rather chipper, though. His 19 year-old grandson, who carries his namesake, is assisting with outstanding engineering tasks — including the installation of an overhaul of the network configuration at Covenant.
It means Joe might finally have some free time to brush up on his programming.
“I have time,” Joe smiled. “I’ll be critiquing Jeff’s coding.”
This is part one of our two-part series where we chatted with Joe and Jeff Geerling. In part two, the Geerlings offer practical advice for broadcasters relating to cybersecurity, AI and radio’s future.
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