Washington - Feb 18, 2009 - The NAB presents its Radio and Television Engineering Achievement Awards each year at the NAB Show. The awards, first established in 1959, are given to individuals for their significant contributions which have advanced the state of the art of broadcast engineering. This year's winners, Jack Sellmeyer (radio) and Sterling Davis (television) will be honored at the Technology Luncheon on April 22 in the Barron Room of the Las Vegas Hilton.

Radio Engineering Achievement Award Winner Jack Sellmeyer
Jack Sellmeyer, CPBE, is a professional engineer and principal engineer for Sellmeyer Engineering, broadcast engineering consultants. He has spent his 50-year career devoted to the development of radio engineering. He is the consummate radio broadcast engineer, who began his career working in radio stations then moving to the manufacturing side of the business designing products for the radio industry. He then combined these aspects of his career to become a consulting engineer handling all aspects of radio engineering from FCC applications to transmitter plant design and construction supervision, broadcast studio facilities planning and construction and AM directional antenna design and adjustment and measurements.

Sellmeyer began working in broadcasting while in high school and his first position was as a board operator and transmitter operator for KPBM radio in Carlsbad, New Mexico. He received a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Arizona State University in 1965. By that time, he had overseen the construction of an addition to the studio/transmitter building, construction of new studios and the installation of a new 5kW transmitter for station KGRT in Las Cruces, NM, and served as chief engineer at station KRUX in Glendale, AZ, among various other pursuits.

While at the Gates Radio division of Harris Intertype, he was a senior design engineer of FM products. He developed a new modulator and automatic frequency control module for the TE-1 solid-state FM exciter to correct frequency stability problems. He worked for the Collins Radio Division of Rockwell International as senior engineer in FM exciters and on the 5kW and 1kW pulse-width modulated transmitters. Sellmeyer worked with Forest Cummings to design low-level solid-state circuit boards used in the Collins 828E-1 pulse-width-modulated 5kW AM transmitter. Collins received three patents on technology used in this transmitter and he was listed as co-inventor on the patent covering automatic modulation sensitivity control.

In November of 1980, when Collins closed its doors, he formed Sellmeyer Engineering. He has lectured at and helped the NAB organize NAB technical seminars and workshops dealing with AM directional antennas and he has published numerous articles. Jack is a member of a number of industry professional societies including the AFCCE, the IEEE, the NSPE, the SBE and the TSPE.

TV Engineering Achievement Award Winner Sterling Davis
Sterling Davis is vice president, engineering for Cox Broadcasting, a veteran with more than 40 years of broadcasting experience. He has been involved with every step of TV engineering, from production to distribution, and has been a prime force in helping to move the television and radio industry into the digital age. He has demonstrated his ability to successfully balance his energy and drive to reach organizational goals, with the necessary diplomacy required to build consensus across a variety of represented businesses and organizations.