The Tyler Woodward Project

The Tyler Woodward Project is a weekly podcast about how technology, media, and radio infrastructure shape the world around us. Hosted by broadcast network engineer Tyler Woodward, the show looks at the hidden systems and behind the scenes decisions that power how we communicate, listen, and connect.

For me, radio isn’t just a topic. It has pretty much always been the thing. My love for the medium goes back to when I was five years old and my mom bought me my first AM/FM radio. I grew up on Tampa’s WFLZ during the Power Pig and 93.3 FLZ eras, totally locked in on the energy and chaos of live radio. Meeting the MJ & BJ Morning Show crew and sitting in on the last hour of one of their shows was the moment it clicked for me that this was what I wanted to do, whether that meant being on the air or making it all work in the background. I was that kid recording myself on a cassette deck and “playing radio” alone in my bedroom.

In high school, I took things a step further and became one of the youngest students accepted into the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, taking night classes around 2004–2005. After that, I interned at WWBA/WHBO and spent a lot of time in the world of internet radio between 2005 and 2014. I ran a few stations, played around with formats, and learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t, even if it wasn’t all that serious yet.

My first real paid gig in radio came in 2014 when I started doing nights on WRQT 95.7 The Rock and WKTY AM 580 in La Crosse. From there, I ended up doing just about everything on the programming side except sales. Over time I was on WIZM-FM, KQYB, KCLH, WKTY, and WIZM. In 2018 I made the jump into the engineering department, and that’s where I really fell in love with the tech side. I got to work on transmitters, audio codecs, studios, consoles, VPN links, STLs, microwave systems, iMediaTouch playout, Tieline gear, and more. We were a small shop without much money, so we stretched what we had and got creative.

In 2021, I moved on from commercial radio and joined a group of public radio and television stations in the Midwest. I was still doing broadcast engineering but now at a larger scale. In the summer of 2025, I moved over to the networking side full time and became a broadcast network engineer. These days I spend a lot of time working with routers and switches, planning VLANs, dealing with MPLS L2/L3 circuits, managing Linux servers and appliances, keeping an eye on monitoring systems, looking after virtual machines and hypervisors, managing VPNs, and supporting playout systems like WideOrbit. I also work with AoIP (Telos Livewire), NinjaRMM, CrowdStrike, and Tenable, and I have hands on with Docker and Linux (mostly Ubuntu and Debian).

Over the years I have picked up a pretty wide toolkit. I have worked with SINE Systems, Zabbix, Grafana, and InfluxDB, and I build my own workflows with Bash, Batch, PowerShell, and Python scripts. I have worked with XDS satellite receivers, Sage EAS gear, DASDEC, Barix codecs, GatesAir Intraplex gear, Sencore UHD receivers, and transmitters from Rohde & Schwarz, Nautel, and Harris, both solid state and tube based. I have done HD Radio with Nautel HD Multicast+ units, worked on Wheatstone consoles and TDM systems at Midwest Family, and set up FreePBX and Sangoma based phone systems for offices. On the RF and wireless side, I have used Ubiquiti and Ignite P2P links for tower connectivity and for public WiFi deployments at events like Oktoberfest and Country Boom, using 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 60 GHz, and 950 MHz links.

One of the projects I am most proud of combined a lot of these pieces into one system. I used Raspberry Pi boards and SDR receivers to build a monitoring solution that fed a central Icecast stream logger. It recorded various stations across our coverage area, chopped the audio into hourly chunks, and generated spectrum graphs and waveform images. That setup made it much easier and faster to spot audio issues, silence events, and other impairments without having to be physically near a radio.

The Tyler Woodward Project sits right in the middle of all of this. Each episode blends analysis with storytelling, pulling from my time on air and my years crawling around rack rooms and transmitter sites. I talk about how signals move, how infrastructure decisions get made, and how algorithms and network choices shape what we actually hear and see. It is a show for anyone who is curious about the inner workings of the tech and media we take for granted, and what all of that says about the culture we are building around it.

You can listen on your favorite podcast platform or browse episodes here on the site. Each post comes with show notes, links, and some extended thoughts that did not make it into the final cut of the episode.