Why Broadcast Engineers Are Vanishing From Radio
Most of America's radio stations no longer have a chief engineer, and nobody notices until a tower goes dark or the FCC fines start piling up. One station sat silent for six months because no one knew the transmitter had failed. That's not an accident. That's what happens when the people who keep the signal on the air get replaced by remote monitoring and a maintenance budget line.
I break down how deregulation, consolidation, and years of low wages hollowed out the engineering ranks. SBE membership is shrinking, the median age keeps climbing, and the people coming in aren't keeping pace with retirements. Meanwhile tower theft and aging infrastructure keep raising the stakes.
This isn't just a staffing problem. Chief engineers are the reason the signal stays clean, the emergency systems work, and the station stays compliant. Lose them and you lose the reliability the whole public safety layer depends on.
There is a radio station somewhere in this country right now that's been silent for six months. Not because of a format flip or a business decision, because the transmitter failed and nobody noticed. That's not a metaphor. That's a real FCC enforcement case from 2024. The licensee told the commission they were unaware the station had gone silent because, well, they lacked any way to remote monitor it. This is the Tyler Woodward project and today I'm talking about where all the broadcast engineers went If you grew up listening to radio
There was almost certainly a chief engineer behind the station that you loved You probably never heard their name. You never thought about them But they were the reason the signal was on the air. The transmitter was running and the tower lights were on at night so airplanes didn't fly into them. The chief engineer was the person who drove out at three in the morning when the transmitter quit working. They maintained the AM directional array, which is a complicated phasing system that keeps your station from interfering with other stations at night. They logged equipment. performance signed off on the public file ran
the EAS test the emergency alert system that's the thing that interrupts programming when there's a tornado warning somebody had to make sure all that stuff worked that job it still exists at some stations public broadcasting is one of the places where this stuff is still taking seriously But in commercial radio that job is being hollowed out in ways that are starting to show up in enforcement files and copper theft reports and In FCC dockets that read like a technical inspection of a building Nobody has been inside of for two years Let's
start with the numbers because they're pretty hard to argue with The Society of Broadcast Engineers is basically the professional organization for this field in 2012 they had over 5 ,000 members by 2025 that's down to roughly 4 ,000 and in their most recent membership drive they added 49 new members 49 the average age of a working SBE member hit 53 .9 back in 2011. By the end of the 2010s it was close to 59. The SBE now describes their typical member as somewhere between
50 and 70 years old with more than 30 years of experience. There's a projection that gets cited a lot in trade coverage right now. The industry needs about 5 ,100 broadcast engineers over the next decade to replace about 6 ,200 who are projected to retire. Now, I'm not good at math, but that's a gap of over a thousand people. And that's before you account for the fact that a lot of these replacement slots simply won't be funded. Now
here's part of why medium wage for broadcast and sound technicians is around roughly 56 ,600 bucks a year The median for computer and IT jobs is north of a hundred thousand if you're a technically minded person in your twenties trying to figure out where to build a career. I mean, the math's not hard. A certified radio engineer with the SPE credentials averages somewhere around 88 ,000. One consultant engineer in New England
told the trade press that to get him into a staff job, The station would need to offer 130 ,000 minimum, maybe 150 ,000 or 160 ,000 in a high cost of living market. Nobody's paying that. Not in commercial radio, not in 2026. And before, you know, anyone in the comments says, well, that's just the market. Yeah. And the market is also Making tower lights go dark and EAS boxes go unchecked. The market is not always right. Ask the pilot who almost clipped an unlit broadcast
tower. So the question is, where did all the engineers go? And when did this whole trend start? The honest answer is 1996. The Telecom Act opened up radio ownership in ways that the industry hadn't seen before. Before it passed, the FCC capped how many stations a single company could own nationally and locally. After it passed, that cap was gone. Within five years of the act, the number of distinct radio owners dropped from About 5100 to about 3800 Clear channel alone
grew to roughly 1200 stations They absorbed what had been roughly 70 separate companies When you own 1200 stations, you don't hire 1200 chief engineers You hire as few as you can get away with and cover the rest with whatever's left That model got refined over the next 25 years By the you know, by the time I heart media clear channel rebranded Emerged from bankruptcy in 2019, you know, they had a specific playbook regional engineer clusters markets sharing engineers across geographic areas that Sometimes makes
absolutely no sense I -25 corridor in Colorado and Wyoming. Fine. Those markets are close. Las Vegas, Riverside and San Diego sharing an engineer. Those are multiple hours apart by car. And a network operation center in Cincinnati that monitors everything remotely. They call the emergency response teams, Tiger teams. flying squads of engineers who get dispatched to major outages. That's what replaced the person who used to drive out from the next town over. In late 2024, I
Heart Media made cuts that included Jeff Littlejohn, who had been their EVP of engineering since 1992. 32 years at the company. The person who was a key architect of the original iHeartRadio app. Gone. His replacement is now overseeing 860 stations in 160 markets. Odyssey, formerly Intercom, runs a tech operations center out of Philadelphia. One centralized hub monitoring the entire company's technical operations across every market simultaneously. They have farm team training, Knox and Chicago,
Denver, Philadelphia. In their March 2025 layoff round, a technical operations director in San Diego was let go after 35 years in broadcast, going back through Jefferson Pilot, Lincoln, Intercom, and Odyssey. When the engineers are gone, what do you get left? You have transmitter sites that nobody has physically visited in months. You have AM directional arrays which need periodic maintenance and proof of performance measurements that are just running on whatever the last engineer set up and hoping nothing drifts. You have tower
lighting that nobody ever checks. And the FCC enforcement files are starting to show it. There's a 2024 case from Texas Corridor television they missed the national EAS test in 2018 Missed it in 2019 missed it in 2021 when the FCC Investigated the station manager said he believed he had performed the test correctly He had prepared an alert to use ahead of time because he didn't know how to receive and save the alert for playback, and didn't realize that each test alert is unique.
That station got hit with a $369 ,190 fine. When the FCC said in that decision is worth reading directly, the licensee is responsible for the actions of its employees. It is not excused for violations due to staff error. Non -compliance over multiple years based on staff's claimed ignorance of the law shows minimal effort. The cause of the whole thing, by the way, personal turnover following a technical server failure.
The engineer left. Nobody else knew. what to do. There's a 2026 inspection case from Michigan WSDS in Salem Township. The FCC showed up and found faded tower paint, extended lighting outages, inadequate fencing, no producible EAS log, no Chief operator signature on any of the logs no equipment performance measurements. No field strength measurements That is a near total collapse of routine engineering practice the transmitter site looked like the last engineer walked out and locked the door behind them and nobody ever
went back and Then there's the copper theft situation, which is almost darkly funny, except that it's actually a public safety issue. In January, 2024, someone cut a guy wire on a 500 foot tower in Hugo, Oklahoma. The tower fell. KITX was silent for months. The copper sold for less than a hundred bucks. You know what the damage was? $500 ,000. In Alabama, an AM station, their entire 200 foot tower disappeared. The transmitter, the equipment,
all of it just gone. Thieves cut the copper ground system from an AM station in Memphis. WGSF was off the air for six months. An AM station has a ground system. Copper buried in the soil around the base of the tower it can be hundreds of radials of copper wire the ground system is what makes the antenna work maintaining it is a routine part of keeping an am station in good shape when nobody is maintaining it well thieves they figured that out and the first sign anyone knows there's a problem is when the transmitter alarm fires and nobody responds Here's where all this lands
for me my takeaway The local radio engineer wasn't just a maintenance person. They were the institutional memory of a station's technical plant They knew which transmitter had a quirk at a high temperature They knew which antenna had it, you know the tendency the ice up in February They knew the EAS box had been swapped in 2019 and needed a certain sequence to reset it correctly That knowledge doesn't live in a knock in Cincinnati. It doesn't get dispatched with the tiger team three days after the transmitter goes down. It lives in the person who shows up every week, does the logs, looks at the meters and catches the smallest
little thing before it becomes a big thing. There are people trying to rebuild the pipeline. The WBA Duke Wright Institute had a new broadcast engineer. emphasis at UW Oshkosh. Alabama's broadcasters run a free training academy. Wake technical in North Carolina graduated 13 SBE certified engineers in 2025. These are real efforts and they matter. But there's still a gap of over a thousand people that need to come in over the next decade. And the pay is still Not there. And the job is still invisible until the tower falls or the lights go out or the tornado warning doesn't make it
to air. I don't know that this gets fixed or how it's going to get fixed. I know it's not being talked about nearly enough. If you haven't yet subscribed to my show. Tyler Woodward project, tylerwoodward .me forward slash podcast. I'll catch you next week.
