Awards

Awards, SBE Chapter 17
2021 through 2026

July 24, 2026.The SBE 17 Engineer of the Year.

Ed grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and began his professional journey in 1980 when he joined the United States Marine Corps as a Field Radio Operator with the 7th Marines. Following his military service, Ed attended the School of Communication Arts in Minneapolis, which launched his career in broadcasting.
In 1985, Ed started at KSTP-TV in the News Department as a Dispatcher and advanced to become a Live Truck Operator. His tenure with Hubbard Broadcasting continued during the launch of KSAX-TV in Alexandria, Minnesota, where he made his home, raised four children, and became deeply involved in the community.
During Ed’s time in Alexandria, he was actively engaged in civic and volunteer work, including Scouting, serving as Vice Commander of the Alexandria American Legion, volunteering as a firefighter, and holding industry leadership roles such as Past Chair of the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce, the Minnesota Broadcasters Association, and the Associated Press.
With more than 25 years at KSAX-TV, Ed held a wide range of roles and responsibilities. He was initially hired as a News Photographer, but his role quickly expanded to include directing morning newscasts, writing, shooting, and editing commercials, and operation of the ENG vehicle.
After furthering his education in electronics at Alexandria Technical College, Ed transitioned into engineering as a Studio Engineer. He continued to expand his expertise in broadcast transmission systems, eventually becoming Chief Engineer, where Ed oversaw a television studio, two full-power transmitters, and numerous low-power translators across Minnesota.
In 2000, Ed was appointed Station Manager of KSAX/KRWF-TV, a role he held for 14 years. In 2012, Ed returned to his hometown of St. Paul to serve as Director of Engineering for KSTP-TV.
Ed remains active in the industry as a member of the University of Minnesota Duluth Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Industrial Advisory Board and the local chapter of the Society of Broadcast Engineers.
In Ed’s personal time, he serves as Commandant of the Marine Corps League Red Wing Detachment and enjoys being a full-time grandparent to three wonderful grandchildren.

November 18, 2025. Our chapter Secretary, Joe Conlon, was a Silver Circle Honoree for his many years of service to the broadcast industry.

Photo Courtesy Upper Midwest Emmy® Chapter

Video Courtesy of Town Square Televison

September 30, 2025: The annual Minnesota Broadcasters Hall of Fame ceremony was held at the JX Venue in Stillwater, MN.

Hall of Fame member Mark Rosen was the master of ceremonies.

Wendy Paulson, President of the Minnesota Broadcasters Association.

Inductees that night were:

Denny Carpenter, entertained audiences in six states and two Canadian provinces while on KSJB Radio in Jamestown, ND. He went on to many on-air gigs, then into radio and television ownership. He received the Borgan Spirit Award at this ceremony.

Caroline Lowe spent 34 years at WCCO-TV reporting crime, then at KARE-TV on the Jacob Wetterling case, among others. Her I-Team reports garnered national attention and has appeared on 20/20, Oprah, Court TV and Forensic Files.

Lou Nanne was a very engaging speaker when he told some of the many stories about becoming General Manager/Coach of the Minnesota North Stars and from his life as a sports reporter.

Brett Paradis started in radio broadcasting management in 1979. Along the way, he served in many civic organizations including The Unity Foundation, Chamber of Commerce and Rotary. He is a Leighton Media's Corporate Advisor.

Alan and Linda Quarnstrom have owned and operated some 32 radio stations over the years. It started in 1992 with WKLK-AM and FM in Cloquet, MN. They are big on community involvement at all of the stations.

Terri Traen started in radio in 1979 and is best known for her on-air work on KQRS-FM in Golden Valley, MN, where she did promotions and interviews for 31 years.

July 25, 2025: The SBE 17 Engineer of the Year.

(l-r) SBE Chapter 17 Chairman Mike Davison congratulating Joe Niffen on becoming the chapter's Engineer of the Year.

Joe Niffen is deserving of this award as he has served the past three years as our chapter’s treasurer. He dealt with paying our chapters various expenses when they came up, he cashed rebate checks when the arrived, and he always answered emails and calls when needed. In addition to his duties as chapter treasurer, Joe has been a regular attendee at Chapter 17 monthly meetings.
Background: SBE Chapter 17 is pleased to nominate Joe Niffen, CSRE (member number 13125) as our Chapter Engineer of the Year because of his many engineering talents and his long-standing dedication to SBE Chapter 17, for whom he has served as Treasurer.
Joe has worked at Minnesota State Services for the Blind, as Chief Engineer for the Communication Center for the past eight years. In this capacity, Joe has had to learn about DAISY digital talking Books for the blind as well as assistive technology used by blind and low vision people. He helped us successfully navigate the transition from distributing our Radio Talking Book Network, RTB, service from FM sub-carrier distribution to a system which is totally distributed by internet-based vehicles including web site, Android and iOS apps, and an Alexa Skill. He developed a system that allows volunteer readers from five locations throughout Minnesota to record local newspapers and automatically move the content to St. Paul for distribution. Joe is well-liked by his colleagues and our volunteers, and has the respect of MN.IT our state IT provider with whom he works closely.
In the mid 2000's Joe was a radio broadcast engineer for the Citadel/Radio Disney group of stations. The group included KQRS, KXXR, LOVE105, and the Radio Disney 1440 Minneapolis station. While in this position he was responsible for computers and servers, analog studios, digital storage and retrieval audio systems, transmitters, STL links and remote broadcasts. Joe kept a professional demeanor and a "can do" attitude. Whether it was the talent, sales, or administration, the staff always enjoyed working with Joe.
Joe grew up in Iowa and attended Brown Institute. He has also worked at Radio Marti/Voice of America, WLOL-FM, Minnesota Public Radio, Dell/Compellent, CBS Radio and more. He has done Level 1 through Level 4 technical support, and has mastered IP as well as RF and AT, and all the other acronyms you can come up with!

October 1, 2024: The Minnesota Broadcasters' Hall of Fame dinner was held in Rochester. MN.

(l-r) Mark Anderson from Bemidji, MN, Chris Grams, WYRQ/KFML/KLTF Radio in Little Falls, Wally and Diane Christensen of KLOH Radio in Pipestone, MN, Paula and Mark Persons, Maynard Meyer from KLQP Radio in Madison, MN, Jim Offerdahl from Fosston, MN along with Tim Russell and his wife.

The induction ceremony for Mark and Paula started with this video.

Then it was time to give speeches. Here is the text of their remarks:
Mark:
We are here today because for 44 years while I was building and repairing radio stations, Paula was in Brainerd talking with customers on the phone and running the business. Interestingly, we never had a Plan B.

We are living in our second architect-designed residence where the electronics shop and office are on the first floor with living quarters above. That made it possible to design and build electronic equipment for the broadcast industry.

Some items were manufactured nearby while hundreds of custom items were hand-built in our shop.

I thoroughly enjoyed being out in the field where I realized things could be done to make stations run better. Then it was back to the shop to design and build something to do just that.

In addition, broadcast equipment for repair came to us from across the nation AND other countries. The money came to Minnesota.

It was not work; it was a lifestyle. Retirement came at age 70. However, this lifetime in broadcasting has not ended. We mentor five radio broadcast engineers. The reward…well…a free lunch now and then.

Paula:
A fun story, Mark was at the WYRQ transmitter site on a farm when a bull  thought Mark was competition for the Heifers. The bull forcefully butted Mark to leave, which he did in a hurry. Next time Mark showed up in town, Chris Grams greeted him with a cape to simulate bull fighting. Farmer later told her the bull could have killed Mark. There is NEVER a dull day in broadcasting!

I used to type articles that Mark wrote for Radio World magazine. That is how I learned he was packing up his gear at a radio station at three in the morning and was suddenly held at gunpoint by a policeman while the station owner was awakened to verify Mark was innocence. How many executives do you know who work in the middle of the night?
Only in radio do you get awakened at 2:00 AM to go downstairs to read a schematic for a transmitter Mark is trying to repair hours away or get called to meet someone at 3:30 AM in northern MN at the halfway point to bring an extra piece of equipment Mark just happened to have in the shop.  That’s why we had our shop where we live.
Our motto was, Take care of the customer and the customer will take care of you.  It was the people like you in this room who made this such a fun ride.  We are very honored and humbled to be receiving this award and thank you very much.
Mark:
We are honored to have worked with some of “America’s Great Radio Stations!”

The plaque reads:
The team of Mark and Paula Persons are from Brainerd where they ran their radio broadcast engineering business for over 44 years. Both are Extra Class amateur radio operators.

Mark started in broadcast engineering as a pre-teen at his family owned WELY Radio in Ely, Minnesota. He did most of the wiring for the family’s KVBR Radio in Brainerd in 1964 at age 17. Mark enlisted in the U.S. Army, taught electronics at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, then spent his 21st year in Vietnam high-tech electronic repair.

Paula was closing secretary at a real estate firm when Mark, now a civilian, was buying a home to set up an electronics shop. They threw her in with the deal! Their marriage in 1978 was a perfect match to be radio broadcast engineering contractors.

They touched most radio stations in the central and northern part of the state. Twelve new radio stations, including six AM directionals, were built from the ground up with Mark’s hands including one in Florida and one in California. Many more were upgraded.

Paula was a full half of the business. While Mark was out in the field building and repairing stations, Paula was in the office telephoning customers and making sure the financial part of the business was being taken care of.

Mark spent time in his shop designing equipment, such as the Programmer 3A Live Assist Controller, for the broadcast industry. He was one of six installers of Motorola AM Stereo in the 1980s. Mark repaired broadcast equipment for local and international customers and is often called the “Radio Doctor.”

Mark continues as a mentor to three radio broadcast engineers and writing for Radio World, with over 200 articles published.

Mark was honored as the 2018 Engineer of the Year by the Society of Broadcast Engineers. Then their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. That was only the tenth such award in the 4500-member association’s 55-year history.
SCUBA diving has occupied much of Paula’s time in retirement with over 1000 dives world-wide.
Mark served as Chaplain at the Brainerd VFW post and continues to write their website, which has received five state awards.

While working, Paula felt it was important to give back to the community. She served on the board of the local humane society, a youth director of their church, a girl scout leader, on the board of the Northland Arboretum, trustee of the VFW Auxiliary, and is past president of Brainerd Rotary. She has also been involved in cleaning over 600 military graves.

Mark has spoken at the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas and at the Wisconsin Broadcasters Clinic, which is now paired with the MN Broadcasters.

Mark and Paula are supporters of Rotary International, the Northland Arboretum, the Pavek Museum, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Habitat for Humanity, and the Salvation Army, among others.

Thursday, July 25, 2024: (l-r) Robert Taylor Barker was congratulated by Chapter 17 President Mike Davison. Taylor is the 2024 SBE Chapter 17 Engineer of the Year.

SBE Chapter 17 is pleased to nominate Taylor Barker, as our Chapter Engineer of the Year because of his long-standing dedication to SBE Chapter 17.

Taylor attend high school in the north Minneapolis suburb of Fridley. He later attended college at University of Minnesota Morris. While he was at the U of M he was active in college radio, eventually serving as the stations General Manager.

In 2017 Taylor served as News Director for Ingstad Family Media. Later, Taylor went on to work for Pioneer PBS, KTTC and currently Nexstar Media Group as Morning Newscast Director.

Since Taylor started to volunteer for our chapter, he has put in many hours of work. From setting up presentations with vendors to getting our meeting locations set to go. He has worked to expand chapter meeting presentations beyond just broadcast vendor presentations. A few examples of meeting presentations include self-driving vehicles, FBI cybercrime investigations, State emergency operation center and coordinators, and many more examples. When he notifies our chapters membership of an upcoming meeting, he will write the message with some “creative flair” instead of a dry message about the location and time.

When Taylor plans out our chapters summer picnic, he will also purchase all of the food and drinks, haul it all to the picnic’s location, unload and set everything up. Same for our annual holiday gathering. He has also contributed to our chapter in other ways. During the pandemic he setup and managed our monthly meetings online. He has been helping transition our chapters email list serve to a Google service in place of our original list serve. At request he even setup and ran a poll of our chapter’s membership on a topic that concerned our members. As our membership lives across the state of Minnesota and into bordering states Taylor has worked to include others that don’t live in the metro area by continuing a remote viewing option and posting recordings on the Chapter 17 YouTube page.

Taylor almost always attends our meetings in person despite living and working a significant distance outside of the Twin Cities Mero area. He is always prepared, he will usually have several questions ready to go for vendor presentations, just in case there aren’t any from the rest of our membership.

Taylor is always willing to help with chapter projects, and he always has a great attitude when working on chapter business.

August 3, 2023:

The Robert W. Flanders SBE Engineer of the Year award is presented to a member who has excelled in his or her career while furthering the mission of the SBE. The 2023 recipient is Joseph Conlon of Inver Grove Heights, MN, currently Secretary of this SBE Chapter.

August 3, 2023: (l-r) Joe Conlon received the SBE Chapter 17 Engineer of the Year award from Chapter Program Chairman Robert Taylor Barker.

December 2, 2022: How many years with Town Square Television?? Joe Conlon, Engineering Manager, CSTE, has been actively engaged as a volunteer, public access producer, board member, and eventually an employee at TST and NDC4, since he was a student at South St. Paul High School, starting around 1988.
Joe joined the nonprofit Board of Directors in 1990 and served on the board about six years before being hired as a staff member in December 1997. In his current role Joe manages the audio/visual engineering needs of our facility, production truck, and four city council chambers, helps to oversee public access services, and spearheads many productions of multi-camera live events with our state-of-the-art production truck.

In the past couple of years Joe’s essential contributions included leading the upgrade of our four city council chambers, studio, edit suites, master control and cable channels to High Definition. He worked tirelessly through the pandemic to assist our cities, schools, churches, nonprofits, members and producers through several rounds of evolving technology, providing virtual and hybrid solutions that kept our community engaged and informed while safe at home.
Joe has also been a leader in our metro wide network of local community media stations who generously share resources and programming with each other. Joe’s passion for the mission of local community media has remained strong over 34 years of service and is still obvious in his work every day.

June 15. 2022: Mike Davison was named the 2022 Chapter 17 Engineer of the Year because of his long-standing dedication to the engineering profession and SBE. Mike grew up south of the Twin Cities Metro Area and graduated from Kenyon Wanamingo High School in 2000. After high school he attended Brown College and received an Associate of Applied Science in Television Production in 2002. During his time at Brown College he interned at Town Square Television, WB23 and 93X. From 2002 to 2006 Mike worked as a Technician for WCCO-TV with responsibilities operating their Air Control, as well as operating the “tape” position for the 5pm, 6pm and 10pm news broadcasts, dubbing commercials from tape into a commercial server for playback on the air, changing backup feed tapes from CBS and CNN, as well as dialing up satellites for news and other feeds. In addition to his job at WCCO-TV worked as an independent contractor from 2002 to 2006 with Town Square Television to run multicamera control rooms for Live city meeting coverage and cover Master Control when regular staff was out sick or on vacation.
In 2006 Mike started fulltime employment with Town Square Television and has continued employment with them to the present. His position started as the primary Master Control Operator, he helped transition the playback facility from analog audio and video to an SDI facility as well as eliminating tape play back to air by setting up a 7-channel playback server. Additionally, he took on not just the playback of programming, but also the scheduling of the channels as other staff left or changed jobs. Mike also worked to set-up web streaming servers to allow viewers access to Town Square Television programming that did not have cable TV, this web streaming system allowed 4 simultaneals Live programs to be sent out.
Over the years Mike took on responsibilities and skills related to the Town Square Television computer network and servers, as part of his advancement in networking skills he obtained the CBNT certification form SBE. Mike has been self-taught in many aspects of computers and website development and maintenance. In 2017 his job at Town Square Television changed to be primarily computer and network related, but still assists with Master Control as needed. As with so many in broadcast IT, the spring of 2020 was a challenge to set-up remote work platforms using equipment on hand, he successfully transitioned a staff of 12 to work from home and continue producing programming and Live coverage of city meetings as well as Live news conferences from the MN Department of Health and MN Govender during lockdown. His remote setups allowed us to also take Live news conferences during protests following the death of George Floyd here in Minnesota.
Mike has been an active member of SBE Chapter 17 since 2008 and is always ready to assists others inside or outside of Town Square Television. Always making it a priority to share with others or take time to train someone new. He works very well with a network of colleagues at similar stations around the Twin Cities and state, creating collaboratives or partnerships, or just helping people out whenever possible. He is always ready and willing to stretch to a new technical challenge, with the attitude of, “Sure, let’s give it a try.” He has been committed to his membership in SBE and continuing the advancement of himself and his fellow employees.

October 18, 2021: The Annual SBE Membership Meeting was held online. Our (Minnesota SBE Chapter 17) was honored for membership growth in Class B. We also took top honors in Chapter Communications IE: this website was deemed best of the 114 SBE chapters world-wide. Chris Tobin from New York was named Engineer of the Year posthumously. He died of a heart attack last winter. Megan Clappe became an SBE Fellow. Congratulations!

June 2021: Jon Blomstrand, (member 11522, CPBE) was SBE Chapter 17 Engineer of the 2021 Year, in recognition of his long-standing dedication of more than 40 years to the engineering profession and a member of SBE since 1988.

Jon Blomstrand is a broadcast engineer with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). Prior to joining MPR, he held the Director of Engineering positions for Hubbard Broadcasting, CBS/Viacom, as well as broadcast engineer for ABC/Walt Disney Companies.

While at Hubbard Broadcasting, Jon applied all his knowledge and experience to the successful completion of rebuilding the Franklin antenna. There are presently very few operating Franklin antennas in the world. Due to the uniqueness of this antenna, the challenge of understanding, redesigning, and rebuilding it is an enlightening education few will ever experience. Ron Rackley designed the system and Jon has mentioned in conversations that it was a genuine pleasure to work with him.

Jon started his broadcast career in high school as a DJ at a local FM station in Nebraska. He quickly realized that was not his calling. He knew broadcasting was where he wanted to be and found his passion and talents were suited to broadcast engineering.

In 2005 Jon, along with Steve Brown, retired chief engineer from WLTE, accomplished the reformation of SBE Chapter 17. The chapter had been dormant for many years. Jon is actively involved and takes pride in being a Chapter 17 officer from 2005 to present, where he has held the positions of program chairman, coordinator, co-chairman, chairman, and is currently treasurer and grill master at the annual picnic. SBE and Jon’s missions align as they work to further educate present engineers while bringing in new talent.

Jon and his son, Nicolas Blomstrand, corporate lead RF engineer for iHeart Radio, have successfully launched Commsulting LLC., working with broadcast stations in the upper Midwest.

Jon’s family is his pride and joy. He is proud of all his children, their spouses, and thoroughly enjoys teaching his grandchildren all the fun and noisy experiments in engineering and science, as he encourages them to go home and
repeat it for their parents. What goes around comes around.

Awards, SBE Chapter 17​2021 through 2026

Awards, SBE Chapter 17
2021 through 2026