HARTFORD, Conn.—The 2019 edition of the IEEE BTS Symposium wrapped up on Thursday, Oct. 3, but not before handing out a pair of awards to industry veterans: Gary Cavell and David Layer.

Cavell was the recipient of the 2019 Jules Cohen Award for Outstanding Broadcast Engineering. Cavell is the president of Cavell, Mertz & Associates and has spent his 40 year career in the industry working in radio and television engineering management, facility design and construction, program production and system station system development. Earlier this year, Cavell was recognized with the 2019 NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award.

The organization then honored Layer with the 2019 BTS Symposium Matti Siukola Best 2018 Symposium Paper Award for his paper, “Pilot All-Digital FM Field Test Project.” Layer is the vice president of advanced engineering for the NAB.

For more information about this year’s IEEE BTS Symposium, click here.

WASHINGTON—Garrison Cavell and Cindy Hutter Cavell of broadcast engineering consultancy Cavell, Mertz & Associates Inc. will receive the 2019 NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award and 2019 NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award, respectively—the first-ever husband and wife broadcast engineers to receive the honors.

Garrison Cavell is president of Cavell, Mertz & Associations and has spent more than 40 years in management and technology positions in radio and television. Before co-founding Cavell, Mertz and prior consultancies, he worked in radio and television engineering management, facility design and construction, program production and station system development in New Orleans. Cavell also was the editor-in-chief of the 11th Edition of the NAB Engineering Handbook.

Cindy Hutter Cavell serves as senior broadcast consulting engineer at Cavell, Mertz & Associates. She has a specialty in TV station and microwave system design and implementation. During her career, Cavell has served as director of operations at ABC News’ Washington Bureau, engineering director of several TV stations, VP of Fox Sports’ Houston Technical Operations Center and broadcast engineering director for Sprint Communications where she led the engineering team responsible for the 2GHz BAS relocation project. She has received many industry honors, including the AWRT/SBE 2007 Outstanding Female Broadcast Engineer Award.

Sam Matheny, NAB EVP and CTO, expressed his enthusiasm about the news in a Tweet this morning. “Very happy to celebrate Cindy and Gary at this year’s @nabshow with this year’s engineering awards. First ever wife and husband to earn this recognition! Each is an amazing person and engineer…and together they are just awesome,” Matheny said in the Tweet.

The pair will receive their awards Tuesday, April 9, during the 2019 NAB Show at the We Are Broadcasters Celebration.

More information is available on the NAB Show website.