I’ve competed against him. I’ve worked for him. I’ve crossed paths with him at numerous industry events, and I’ve even interviewed him a time or two. Now it is time to say goodbye to him as he retires from ATSC as its Vice President of Standards Development after 25 years with the organization.
Of course, I’m referring to Jerry Whitaker, one of the true gentlemen of the industry. With an affable temperament and love for radio and television engineering, he has conquered many career mountains over the years.
Going to work full-time for KCRA radio in Sacramento, Calif., at the age of 19, Whitaker worked as a morning news editor and later as a producer. “But my real interest was in engineering,” he said, so Whitaker got his FCC First Class License and found a job as an engineer at an AM station in Eureka, Calif., market 183, in the late 1970s.
“I loved radio engineering. It was fun. I would have done it for free. Well, come to think of it, it was almost free,” he mused. Shortly after joining the station, he recalled driving home from dinner and the station intermittently going off and on air.
“We had a Gates BC5H transmitter,” he said. “I had seen meter readings on the IPA, intermediate power amplifier, for the 5H, which had been varying over time. But I didn’t have enough history with the machine to know if it was significant or not.
“So, I pull out the exciter and looked at it. Maybe it’s the output transistor. I thought 'that’s not a very good diagnosis.' But I looked around to see what I could find, and there’s this 25uF, 50V electrolytic capacitor with goo on the one side. And I thought, I know what that is, and replaced the capacitor, put it back together, pushed on and was a hero. And the rest is history as they say.”
By 1983, Whitaker joined Broadcast Engineering as the magazine’s radio editor. Eventually, he became editorial director of BE and was then promoted to associate publisher.
One of his favorite magazine memories occurred at the Fall SMPTE Conference in Los Angeles when, as the newly minted radio editor, he visited Solid State Logic’s booth with the magazine publisher.
“We sat down at his SSL board with [the late] Doug Dickey,” he recalled. “It was eight-feet long—just enormous. And I’m used to a radio board, which if it had 10 channels was a lot. He’s telling me about this, and here’s the send, and here’s the return. And I’m thinking, 'what the heck is this?' But I managed to bluff my way through and say: ‘Mm-hmm, I see.’”
But if you do something long enough, you learn along the way, especially if you write articles read by broadcast engineers. That’s doubly so if you’re writing and editing technical tomes, which Whitaker has done in spades.
Over his career, he has written or edited some 50 books and counts the 2,500-page “The Electronics Handbook,” published by CRC Press in 1996, as his most important work.
In the year 2000, he joined ATSC as Technical Director, a title which the organization changed a few years later to Vice President of Standards Development. In that role he has helped shepherd standards development, including the industry’s most significant effort since A/53 (ATSC 1.0) was published in 1995, namely the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards.
“When I joined the staff in 2000, I knew a lot about broadcasting, at least I thought I did, but I didn’t know about standards development. It’s a specialized thing,” he said. “I found that the people I worked with were very willing to explain the process, explain the details that I didn’t understand and were forgiving if I asked dumb questions.”
At a certain point, you’d be sitting in meetings and think, 'I’m going to ask this question, and then no, that’s probably a dumb question.' Then somebody else asks it, and the speaker says, ‘That’s a good question.’"
During his early days at ATSC, Whitaker found standards meetings to be a bit intimidating. “I’d walk into a room and look around the table, and there was [the late] Joe Flaherty [CBS] and there was Renville McMann [CBS], and there was Tom Hankinson [ABC]. It was like, ‘What am I doing here?’”
But with time, Whitaker grew comfortable at those meetings. “At a certain point, you’d be sitting in meetings and think, 'I’m going to ask this question, and then no, that’s probably a dumb question.' Then somebody else asks it, and the speaker says, ‘That’s a good question.’ People were willing to sit down and explain why we wanted to do things in certain ways.”
As he prepares to depart at the end of August, the industry awaits what the FCC will decide to do about sunsetting ATSC 1.0 to make way for 3.0. Whitaker was quick to point out that he does not get involved with the regulatory side of broadcast standards.
Still, sitting in the seat he has occupied for a quarter century, Whitaker seemed to be the perfect person to ask about how the industry and standards body made the decision to develop a non-backward compatible TV transmission standard—one of the biggest hurdles the industry faces in a 1.0 sunset.
ATSC put out a public call seeking input what the new broadcast standard should be, he said. “People presented their ideas on what was possible today [at the that time] and what was possible tomorrow. That detailed report led to ATSC 3.0.
“We realized clearly that if we’re going to develop a new television system, it needs to offer benefits that the current system simply cannot and so it needs to be a pull. Consumers need to want to have it. That’s what we set out to develop.”
What are his plans post ATSC? “Well, I have hobbies as you can see,” Whitaker said during our Zoom interview as he sat amidst the vintage radio gear he has restored.
“When I was in Eureka, I rebuilt the AM station and put the FM, KPDJ-FM, on the air, Class C, from a construction permit. Thanks to eBay and a lot of repair work, I’ve collected pretty much everything we had there down to the automation system and the carousel cart machines and all of that fun stuff.
“So, I’ll keep up with that and keep trying to come up with answers to the question I get from my family members, which is: ‘Why dad? Why would you do this?’”
