Rocky Mountain Community Radio’s Shared Engineering Initiative is a network-wide effort to strengthen engineering capacity across all 21 member stations. Funded by Press Forward—a national initiative to reimagine local news—the initiative addresses a challenge every station in the region faces: limited engineering support, aging infrastructure, and increasing technical complexity.
The goal is to establish a shared engineering system that boosts technical resilience, supports local news infrastructure, and expands access to skilled engineering talent across all RMCR stations.
To coordinate this work, RMCR has hired Bill Sundahl, Z&W Unlimited as Project Coordinator. Bill is meeting with station leadership and engineering contacts to gather history, context, and immediate needs. Each station will have opportunities to provide input, review findings, and help shape the shared model.
Over the next few months, we will conduct a comprehensive needs assessment, map upcoming projects and deferred maintenance, standardize reporting, and design and implement a staffing model that can serve the network long-term.
In the next phases, RMCR will begin implementing the shared engineering model across the network. This includes hiring and deploying the Shared Engineer, establishing shared tools and processes, piloting regional engineering support, and building long-term systems for training, documentation, equipment planning, and collaborative problem-solving. All of this work is designed to ensure stations receive consistent technical support and that RMCR can sustain the model for years to come.
This initiative represents a significant step toward enhancing technical stability, alleviating the burden on individual stations, and establishing a future-ready engineering infrastructure for the entire RMCR network.
Project Coordinator
Bill Sundahl, Z&W Unlimited
pc@rockymountaincommunityradio.org
816.365.3128 mobile
Rocky Mountain Community Radio 