Andy Anderson
After brief stints in commercial radio and television, a move to Denver in 1966 brought Anderson into public television at KRMA-TV (now Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting) where he supervised the station's conversion from black and white to color. A growing family and better pay across town led him to the Denver NBC affiliate, KOA-AM-FM-TV, where he served as an Engineering Supervisor from 1968-1974. In 1974 Anderson returned to public television as Director of Engineering for the Rocky Mountain Corporation for Public Broadcasting regional broadcast facility and PBS delay center, which, in the days of telephone landline interconnection, was responsible for recording incoming feeds from PBS and playing them back later for stations in the Mountain and Pacific time zones. He spent five years at RMCPB, leaving in 1979 (shortly after PBS's move to satellite interconnection) to become Chief Engineer at KRMA-TV where he was soon promoted to the position of Director of Engineering. Anderson stayed in that position for eight years, until the station changed from a school board to a community licensee. In order to secure his retirement benefits from the school system, Anderson stayed with the Denver school system, teaching electronics to high schoolers for the next two years. In 1991, Anderson returned to public television as Chief Engineer for KUHT. A year later he assumed his current post as Director of Engineering and Operations. Anderson's current boss, Jeff Clark, noted that "it was Andy who laid the framework for Houston PBS's move to a new $18.5 million state-of-the-art broadcast center, the completion of which marked the culmination of his efforts to establish KUHT as a technological leader in Houston as well as in public broadcasting." Since the NAB, KUHT has become the 30th public television station to begin DTV transmissions. His reputation for making complex engineering information easy for non-techies to understand is revered. In his taped remarks Clark noted that as station staff were planning a trip to look at various facilities as models during the early design stages for their new broadcast center, Senior Vice Chancellor for the University of Houston System, Dr. Dell Felder declared that she would not make the trip unless "...Andy was aboard to explain it all to her."
PBS 2001 Excellence In Engineering Award Winner !!
Director of Engineering and Operations, KUHT
Houston, Tx.
Anderson, a native Kansan, grew up with an expectation that he would become a doctor. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Civilization and English at the University of Kansas, he started medical school, but after two years decided that medicine was not his chosen field, opting instead for a career in broadcast engineering.
2001 PBS Technology Conference CD-ROM