New Age Media employee Scott McCutcheon, satelite coordinator and broadcast engineer, maintains more than 20 satelite dishes on East Main Street. He has been on the job for three years.Scott Truckenmiller is the caretaker of one of Chattanooga’s largest gardens of satellite dishes in one location. He is all tech, all the time.
An employee of New Age Media, he manages satellite reception for three television stations that are broadcast and cabled to area homes and businesses.
“All of these dishes out here serve lots and lots of purposes,” Truckenmiller said. “We have around 20 dishes out here at our satellite farm here at 1101 E. Main Street.”
He controls three stations through one facility – the CW Chattanooga, Fox 61 and My Network TV.
“We can tune in just about anything up in the sky,” he said.
But it’s not just physical care of the dishes on the outside. Inside the control room, Truckenmiller can be found adjusting and tweaking a multitude of instruments that would baffle the average electronics buff.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, he fine-tuned reception from a Southeastern Conference basketball game, in both analog and digital reception.
The windy winter day proved to be a problem, forcing him to switch from one satellite dish to another one on the lot.
Then the audio went missing until he dialed an engineer onsite at the live broadcast game. Within minutes, the engineer made sure the remote feed to his equipment was up to specifications.
“Every time I come out here to mess with these dishes, I always feel like a James Bond villain,” Truckenmiller said. “I think back to (the movie) ‘Goldeneye.'”
The villain in that movie used a satellite dish to fire an electromagnetic pulse bomb that crashed planes and helicopters and fried computers, he said.
“Basically, it was a nuclear bomb set off outside the atmosphere,” he said. “Of course, we don’t have those here, but I’m trying to put it in the budget.”
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