When the history of digital television in the United States is written, the individuals involved will read like a who’s who of broadcast technology. Many of those have been honored by the NAB with its annual Broadcast Engineering Excellence Award, and this year’s honoree is no exception.
Dennis W. Wallace is managing partner at Meintel, Sgrignoli & Wallace, LLC, a broadcast engineering and technical consulting firm founded in 2004. He developed and implemented RF field test programs for the HDTV Model Station Project at the Advanced Television Test Center in Washington, D.C., and built and conducted studies and demonstrations at the ATSC 3.0 Test Station in Cleveland.
Over the years his field-testing projects have included assessment of mobile DTV service, interference from unlicensed devices, effects of windmills on DTV reception, Distributed Transmission Systems, comparison of UHF and VHF spectrum for ATSC 3.0 and chairing the ATSC 3.0 Field Testing Task Force.
I got a chance to talk with Dennis recently and learned a bit more about what brought him to the industry.
As a kid growing up in Indianapolis, Dennis got involved in his high school’s 400W Class A radio station but “I quickly learned that I was more interested in the technical parts of it than I was necessarily being on the air,” he said. Jack Tiller, a professor at nearby Butler University, who taught mass media, helped Dennis get his start in actually getting paid for what he enjoyed doing.
“He took me under his wing and actually employed me part time in the summers to rewire studios at the university and that sort of thing. So that was my foray into engineering.”
Although Dennis had plans to attend Butler full time, prior to entering college, he entered a competition on entrepreneurship and won at both the state and national level. The prize was a scholarship to ITT Technical University, which he decided to pursue instead.
He almost completed the course before being hired by WIIB, a new UHF station in Indianapolis, in 1989. By the mid-’90s, Dennis had landed at the ATTC, working alongside one his mentors, Charlie Rhodes, who also penned TV Tech’s Digital TV column for decades.
Dennis remembers how Charlie would urge his fellow engineers to always push for more. “He would cajole a few of us to stay late or work extra and work on whatever question he had, along with the Grand Alliance engineers, to try to explore something. Those became what we referred to as ‘the Charlie projects.’ And we always learned a lot.”
Asked about the high point of his career (so far!), Dennis points to his work with the ATTC. “I started off at analog broadcasting, did the lab testing for the RF side of DTV, helping stations transition, and then shutting down analog and now in the twilight of my career, on replacing the system that I helped build.”
Dennis’s entrepreneurial and technical skills have helped him and his colleagues create one of the leading consulting firms in the broadcast industry. “One of the unique things that I bring to broadcast engineering is an understanding of the business implications of the technical pieces of it,” he said. “And I’ve kind of built a career at the intersection of business, technology and regulatory policy matters. That’s really what I do.”
Congratulations Dennis on this well deserved honor! Dennis will be recognized along with this year’s Radio winner Paul S. Shulins, at the “We Are Broadcasters Awards,” held on the Main Stage of the 2025 NAB Show, Tuesday, April 8, in Las Vegas.
