With the added pressure of audience share, we continued to look for ways to stay ahead in technology, newsgathering skills, and presentation. The helicopter wars were slowing down as a new technology was emerging: Satellite News Gathering or SNG.

         In the fall of 1984 (perhaps an Orwellian ominous year), Ray Blush was serving as News Director and I was working as News Operations Manager, a new position that encompassed everything from convention coverage to satellite development.  Despite the high falootin' title, my News Operations office was a broom-closet size space located behind the new assignment desk.

    Ray received some information that a new technology was being considered in the market and WTVT was approached by a representative from Conus Communications, which was a new company developed by the Hubbard family of Minneapolis, long-time broadcasters and innovators. One of their engineers, Ray Conover, known to us later as 'Dr. Dish', had speculated over dinner one evening that a satellite dish could be installed on a truck chassis, so news coverage could originate from virtually anywhere.

          That was a breakthrough. Heretofore, satellite transmission was primarily from fixed locations such as Washington D.C. and other major cities. While huge tractor-trailer rigs carrying large C-band dishes were used for sporting events and other planned happenings such as conventions, they weren’t practical for day-to-day news coverage. First, they were expensive. Second, it took weeks to get FCC approval involving frequency coordination so the uplink wouldn’t interfere with terrestrial microwave systems. And third, it took special licenses to drive the huge rigs. Therefore, news departments never took those trucks seriously. The only options for stations at the time were live shots using microwave, live ENG trucks which had, at best, a 40 mile range from a receive point, or the use of a helicopter to relay a signal from a truck on the ground back to the ENG receive location…a pretty expensive relay system.

          The FCC opened up a new satellite band, called the Ku-band, which was more suitable for portable operations. The Commission was not going to require extensive frequency coordination, if any. The dish size was smaller than C-band, so it could fit on the back of a truck. And with the trucks being smaller, no special driver’s license would be necessary.

          So 'Dr. Dish', on the back of a napkin, reportedly designed the first SNG truck. Within months, the Hubbards started Conus as a News Cooperative and Hubcom, based in St. Petersburg, to build SNG trucks.  Charles “Chuck” Dutcher, the GM of WTOG, Channel 44, in St. Pete (a Hubbard station), was picked to head the new venture. In several meetings that fall, he outlined to Ray and later to me, when I succeeded Ray as News Director, the benefits of joining Conus and building a truck. To his credit, our GM Harry Apel caught the vision and made the extensive financial commitment required to get underway. A high six-figure amount was required to build the truck, join the news cooperative and also to purchase a slice of the satellite transponder that we would be using to relay stories back from the field.