The Michigan Association of Broadcasters has announced the 2024 recipients of its Carl E. Lee Broadcast Engineering Excellence Awards. The awards are named for Carl E. Lee, a prominent Michigan broadcast engineer and station owner who was known for his innovation and recognition of opportunity, according to MAB.
Two awards are given to represent both radio and TV engineers.
This year, the radio engineering excellence award was given to Dave Grant, the director of engineering for Cumulus Media in Grand Rapids, Mich.
In his nomination, Grant was said to be “a great mentor to all as he is always sharing his years of knowledge and explaining to staff how equipment works.”
According to the nomination, his radio career began in 1977 as a board operator at WKBZ in Muskegon running Detroit Tigers baseball games and eventually moved up to a phone screener position.
In 1979 Dave began working in Whitehall at 1490 WLRQ as an on‐air personality and started getting into engineering by repairing equipment around the facility while working with their engineer.
After a series of other chief engineering roles, in 2012 Grant became chief engineer for Cumulus Media Grand Rapids. He maintains six AM/FM radio broadcast facilities and assists with four additional stations in Muskegon.
“Dave is more than just a broadcast engineer as he also has found himself doing maintenance on generators that should have been retired years ago,” read the nomination. “He is one that can think creatively and always produces a solution.”
On the other side of the broadcast coin, the 2024 award for TV engineering excellence was given to David Madison, the former, longtime IT/maintenance engineer for WGVU Public Media in Grand Rapids, Mich. Now retired after 35 years with the company, his nomination reads: “[Madison’s] legacy of keeping WGVU on the air for so long needs to be honored. He will be greatly missed in retirement and his engineering talents can’t be replaced.”
Grant and Madison will be honored at the Michigan Broadcast Engineering Conference Mar. 12-13 in Lansing, Mich.
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