This Week In Radio Tech (TWiRT)

The spark, motivation, and process for invention is absolutely fascinating! This week we got lucky and found two gentlemen who epitomize the spirit of invention. They often do this by asking, “What is it that we’re really trying to do here?” Sometimes the answer results in new approaches to the problem or task. Mike “Catfish” Dosch and Cornelius Gould are working on some projects at Angry Audio. This provided a perfect opportunity to interview them together and discuss the inventor’s process.

On this episode of This Week in Radio Tech, we welcome a true legend of the newsroom—Bob Hardt. From his early days at WXYZ to anchoring at WABC and ultimately rising to the top at ABC Radio News in New York City, Bob shares a career shaped by storytelling, breaking news, and the evolving tools of the trade. Host Kirk Harnack dives into how technology changed the game—from cart machines to digital editors—and how those shifts made newsgathering faster, sharper, and more agile. If you’ve ever wondered how great radio news gets made, or how the newsroom adapted from analog chaos to digital speed, this conversation with Bob Hardt is one you won’t want to miss.

Seven hundred and fifty episodes of TWiRT! Wow! It’s my honor today to welcome two innovative broadcast engineers and businessmen - and business partners with Telos Alliance - Tyler Everitt and Grant Biebrick. We’re learning about the practical equipment and systems that their company, Pippin Technical Service (PTS) brings to Canadian broadcasters. Tyler and Grant reveal the innovative networked devices and systems that PTS has developed and installed at hundreds of facilities in Canada.

Oakwood University, located in Huntsville, Alabama, is renowned for its significant contributions to gospel and Christian music, particularly through its alumni who have achieved fame in these genres. Groups like Take 6 and soloists such as Brian McNight are alumni of Oakwood, along with many, many more. Oakwood is also home to WJOU-FM, and we all know that university-owned radio stations often go a couple decades between serious studio upgrades. WJOU is overdue for new equipment, and not just for the sake of newness. Indeed, the station’s leadership staff recognizes the need for more diverse music and talk programming, but one signal isn’t enough. So, WJOU-FM is remodeling and building new studios to accommodate four different formats, and finishing an HD Radio transmission system to accommodate them. Good leadership and big upgrades go hand-in-hand, so on this episode we’re meeting with Dawna Baker and Dammeon Malone from WJOU, and with broadcast system integrator, Josh Bohn and field engineer Mike Hutchens from MaxxKonnect. Together they’re give us a worthy overview of this major upgrade process from the perspectives of management, operations, and engineering.

The Story of the Broadcast Cart Machine is fascinating, especially to those of us who used them on-air, or installed and repaired them as engineers. Andy Rector, who was heavily involved in the business of broadcast cart machines, joins us for Part 2 of our exploration into this history. We’ll go through the 1970s and 1980s, as new broadcast cart machines were developed and deployed. We’ll follow this story arc right up to the late 1990s, when Andy says was really the end of that cart machine era.