NAB Technology Awards
About the Awards
The Radio and Television Engineering Achievement Awards are presented to individuals for their outstanding accomplishments in the radio or television broadcast industry, respectively. The Digital Leadership Award honors an individual at a broadcast station, group or network who has transformed a traditional broadcast business to succeed on digital media platforms.
2024 Winners
Sun Sachs
Digital Leadership Award
Sun Sachs is the senior vice president of Digital Products at Townsquare Media. Sachs’ distinguished career in media and digital has been marked by significant growth and innovation over more than a quarter of a century. Since joining Townsquare Media in 2010, he has been instrumental in driving substantial audience expansion and revenue growth. Townsquare’s remarkable digital transformation includes growing from 1 million unique visitors per month in 2010 to 75 million in 2024. Sachs and his team’s work has been pivotal in developing Townsquare’s proprietary content management system and mobile application platform, which serve both their local radio stations and nationally recognized websites, as well as other digital products helping to drive digital revenues from <5% of total revenue in 2010 to >50% in 2023.
Sachs previously served as the vice president of Product at AOL Media and has been a creative and technology leader at various other digital firms in New York throughout his career.
Sachs’ distinguished career has earned him numerous awards and accolades, including a Webby, IMA, MIXX, a Technology Emmy nomination and the 2022 NAB PILOT Innovation Challenge award.
Sachs is an active member of the NAB Digital Officer Committee, the NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference Committee and has served as a moderator at NAB conferences.
Dave Kolesar
Engineering Achievement Award for Radio
David Kolesar has worked in the broadcast engineering field for over 30 years, and currently serves as a senior broadcast engineer for Hubbard Radio, where he has worked since 2006. Kolesar previously was an Electronics Engineer in the Information Technology Division of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Kolesar is a broadcast engineering pioneer, having commissioned the first full-time all-digital AM radio station in the U.S. by converting, adapting, and rehabilitating Hubbard station WWFD in Frederick, Md., serving as the chief engineer as well as the program director.
In addition to his efforts to make all-digital AM radio a reality, Kolesar has been an advocate for all-digital AM within the industry, sharing and documenting his work in numerous technical papers and at conferences, and continuing research on ways to improve all-digital AM performance.
Kolesar has been recognized by other industry organizations for his contributions including receiving the Radio World Excellence in Engineering award in 2019 and the Society of Broadcast Engineers Chapter 37 Engineer of the Year award in 2020.
Winston Caldwell
Engineering Achievement Award for Television
Winston Caldwell has over 25 years of electrical engineering experience, specializing in network communications, security, spectrum management, and standards development. He began his career at Fox Corporation in 2000, spending 23 years there in various engineering roles, including vice president of spectrum engineering. He then became an independent consultant in 2023 with Pearl TV, the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA) and NAB among his clients.
Caldwell led the development and deployment of the A3SA security system, which protects Next Gen TV services and broadcast content. He also managed engineering efforts for transitioning Fox stations to the ATSC 3.0 system and served as chairman of the NAB Next Generation Broadcast Platform Task Force.
Caldwell’s technical analysis in contributions to development of spectrum policy have been utilized in regulatory matters, domestically at the FCC and internationally at the International Telecommunication Union.
Caldwell is a frequent presenter and panelist at technical conferences and actively participates in several ATSC 3.0 specialist groups. In addition, he is a longstanding member of the NAB Television Technology Committee.