Inside the signal chain

I'm a broadcast network engineer, a radio guy, and probably the kind of person who keeps way too much old technology in a junk drawer.

This show is about pulling back the curtain on broadcast radio: the transmitters, the studios, the gear, and the engineers who keep a signal on the air whether anyone's paying attention or not. I want to show and tell people how radio actually works - what happens between a microphone and your car speakers, how a station gets from a studio to a tower miles away, and what it actually takes to keep a signal from going dark.

Most people never think about any of it. That's kind of the point of good engineering - it's invisible when it's working. I want to make it visible.

I grew up in Tampa listening to AM and FM radio, getting hooked on WFLZ during the Power Pig era when I was five years old. As a teenager, I was doing volunteer technical work at a community media station, learning to solder and patch cables before I could even drive. Eventually I went through the Connecticut School of Broadcasting and spent nearly a decade running my own internet radio station from my house. Just me, an Icecast server, a CentovaCast panel, and enough stubbornness to keep the thing on the air.

My career eventually took me from programming, board operating, and being on the air in La Crosse into broadcast engineering. I moved into transmitter and field engineering before eventually landing in broadcast networking, where I work today supporting a group of public media stations. I hold a CBNT certification through the Society of Broadcast Engineers, and my day job puts me pretty close to the entire signal chain, from RF and transmitters to networks and everything in between - which is exactly the stuff I want to start explaining here.

That background is also why I think most listeners have no idea how much actually happens behind a single radio signal.

Expect episodes on how a transmitter gets a signal into the air, what a studio-to-transmitter link is and why it matters, why AM and FM behave so differently, what a tower climb actually looks like, and what breaks in the middle of the night that gets an engineer paged out of bed.

No guests. No sponsors reading copy I didn't write. Just one guy who grew up glued to an AM/FM radio, ended up running the things for a living, and wants to show you what's actually happening inside that box on your dashboard.