Ed Miller, a longtime broadcast engineer in Ohio and a former national president of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, has died.
The news was shared in an email to colleagues by Blake Thompson, chairman of SBE Chapter 70 in Cleveland. Thompson said Miller was in his early 80s.
Edward J. Miller was president of the SBE from 1997 to 1999. During his tenure, the SBE and the National Football League announced a cooperative effort to coordinate frequency use for all regular-season and postseason NFL games, with the SBE appointing a game-day event frequency coordinator for each team’s home games. The NFL would equip the coordinators with a laptop, scanner, press box space and a telephone, as well as database software and contact information for each team’s personnel and local and network media.
Also during his tenure, with IT skills becoming ever more important, the SBE Certification Committee prepared a new level of certification to test knowledge about administering local-area networks (LANs). The society also introduced a youth membership category during this time.
Miller was drawn to technology early. In the fall of 1957, as a high-school sophomore in Cleveland, he was one of only five individuals in the country to track the radio signal from the Russian Sputnik 1 satellite. He and his fellow radio club members made national news and were later told they had scooped the U.S. Navy by four hours.
In 2013, Miller wrote a biographical sketch of his career, including his work with radio and TV stations, his involvement with prototype IFB/Mix-Minus technology, his design and management of dozens of broadcast microwave systems, his involvement with the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and his consulting work for the grand opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
You can download that biographic essay here.
In 2003 he retired as vice president of engineering at ProVideo Systems. Earlier he worked for 28 years with WEWS-TV, the Scripps Howard Broadcasting Co.’s flagship station and ABC affiliate in Cleveland. He later worked as a consultant/project engineer with PATLIN Electronics Inc. in Richfield, Ohio.
At the SBE, in addition to president, he was involved in other ways over the course of his career.
He served for many years as a frequency coordinator for northeast Ohio and multiple times as a chapter chair. He worked on the program committee for the Ohio Association of Broadcasters fall engineering conference and participated in a national SBE Strategic Planning Meeting in 2012.
In 2013 Miller was named the Robert W. Flanders SBE Engineer of the Year. He also was a Life Member and SBE Fellow. When he received the Engineer of the Year Award, then-President Ralph Hogan said Miller “has truly been one of the principal leaders of the SBE over the past 20 years.”
SBE Communications Director Chriss Scherer got to know Ed Miller when Scherer lived in Cleveland in the 1990s. “Ed was always thoughtful and considerate,” he told Radio World on Tuesday. “In a leadership position, he would seek input from several points of view and produce a clear, reasoned decision. Working with Ed is one of the reasons I furthered my involvement with the SBE.”
[Read Miller’s thoughts about his tenure as SBE president in this Radio World issue from 1999. The article starts on page 43.]
[This article originally appeared in our sister publication Radio World.]
