Last month, the NAB announced the recipients of one of our industry’s highest honors, the Engineering Achievement Awards in Radio and Television. For radio, the honor goes to Bert Goldman, owner and president of Goldman Engineering Management, in recognition of more than 50 years of leadership and innovation in broadcast engineering.
The television honor goes to Harvey Arnold, senior vice president of engineering for Sinclair Broadcast Group, who is being recognized for his leadership and longstanding contributions to advancing broadcast technology. Harvey is an SMPTE Fellow and member of the SMPTE Board of Editors. A former chairman of the NAB TV Technology Committee, he remains active in ATSC, SMPTE, SBE and AFCCE. He is also a recipient of the Broadcasting+Cable Technology Leadership Award.
Both men will receive their awards at the We Are Broadcasters Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, April 21 at the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas.
Harvey’s career spans nearly 50 years in broadcast engineering. A native of New York City, Harvey says he caught the “bug” as a child in the early 1960’s when his father took him on a tour of the NBC facilities at Rockefeller Center.
“In those days, people could actually tour the technical facility; you could walk past the tape machines and the cameras,” he said. “And as a little guy, I was just enamoured with this stuff.”
Harvey attended the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s, where his enthusiasm for broadcast was further piqued by working at WGBW, the campus radio station.
“We actually built a 5-kilowatt transmitter which we resurrected from another radio station,” he said. “I was hooked on it from that point on.”
After working for several commercial TV stations, Harvey joined North Carolina Public Television in 1980, where, during his 17-year career, he managed and expanded engineering and transmission operations for one of the nation’s largest statewide public television networks. He also participated in activities of the FCC Advisory Committee for Advanced Television Service (ACATS), helping test the ATSC DTV standard in the field and guide the rollout of DTV in the U.S.
In 1998, Harvey was recruited by Nat Ostroff, who led Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Advanced Technology team, and tapped into his experience at PBS to help the company transition from analog to ATSC 1.0.
Harvey said Sinclair’s reputation as a “technology-first” company was among the biggest reasons he joined the company, adding that Sinclair President David Smith would often present him with challenging projects.
“He would call me into his office for technical questions, and when I told him, ‘This is difficult and we’re not going to be able to do it because it defies the laws of physics,’ he would always smile and say, ‘Harv, you can work through that, you can figure it out,’” he said.
As our industry transitions to ATSC 3.0, Harvey has been at the forefront of Sinclair’s initiatives, including the development of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), helping test the technology in the Washington D.C. area.
Harvey emphasized the importance of the transition, particularly in terms of its place in the nation’s public safety ecosystem.
“Broadcasters need to embrace NextGenTV, and we need to be relevant... [BPS and emergency notification] are key examples of things that can directly benefit the public,” he said.
Harvey’s dedication to advancing and expanding broadcast technology over nearly half a century is a testament to his enthusiasm for our industry and TV Tech congratulates him on this well-deserved honor!
