Guy Bouchard, IEEE BTS Awards Committee chair, presents Matti Siukola Memorial Award to David Layer, Senior Director of Advanced Engineering.

Each year the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society bestows the Matti Siukola Memorial Award, recognizing the best paper presented at the Annual Broadcast Symposium. The award honors Dr. Siukola, an eminent broadcast antenna engineer. At this week’s 2015 IEEE Broadcast Symposium (October 14-16, 2015, Orlando, FL), the award for best paper at the 2014 Symposium was given to NAB’s own David Layer, Senior Director, Advanced Engineering, for his paper entitled “All-digital AM Radio Field Test Project.”

Mr. Layer’s paper provided information and results from the NAB Labs all-digital AM field test project which was concluded in late 2014. A more complete version of this paper (including additional data not available when the IEEE presentation was made) was given at the 2015 NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference (BEC) and is included in the 2015 BEC Proceedings.

Recent recipients of the Matti Siukola Memorial Award are shown in the table. This is Mr. Layer’s third “best paper” recognition in his 30-year engineering career, the other two being the Institute of Navigation (ION) GPS-92 Best Paper Award (1992) for his paper entitled “Transmission of DGPS Correction Signals Using an Inmarsat-C Channel,” and the International Conference on Digital Satellite Communications 9 Best Paper Award (1995) for the paper “A B-ISDN Compatible 140/155 Mbps Modem & Codec” (with co-authors S. Miller, P. Johnson, and F. Hemmati). Mr. Layer received these earlier honors while employed by COMSAT Laboratories, a satellite communications R&D lab located in Clarksburg, MD.