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Knoxville TV History

E

eacalhoun1

The Knoxville Radio History thread is great and I was afraid that I would jinks it by throwing in TV -- but TV is like radio or even FM, just with pictures!! It's still RF!!

For some reason, I've always been interested in what transpired around 1980(I think) when WTVK 26 went away and Channel 8(whatever the calls were at the time) went on the air. I have MANY questions about this so I will just list them below:

*Did TV26 go dark for a period before TV8 came on to "replace" it or was it an announced transition for viewers to begin watching TV26 programming on the new TV8?

*Was TV26 and TV8 under same ownership during this time?

*Why didn't TV26 stay on the air as an Independent? It would've likely become an affiliate of the new Fox network not too many years later.

This was also at a time when many US TV Markets were swapping network affiliations with their competitors. I remember when WBIR-TV was CBS; WATE was NBC; and WTVK was ABC.

Eric
 
eacalhoun1 said:
The Knoxville Radio History thread is great and I was afraid that I would jinks it by throwing in TV -- but TV is like radio or even FM, just with pictures!! It's still RF!!

For some reason, I've always been interested in what transpired around 1980(I think) when WTVK 26 went away and Channel 8(whatever the calls were at the time) went on the air. I have MANY questions about this so I will just list them below:

*Did TV26 go dark for a period before TV8 came on to "replace" it or was it an announced transition for viewers to begin watching TV26 programming on the new TV8?

*Was TV26 and TV8 under same ownership during this time?

*Why didn't TV26 stay on the air as an Independent? It would've likely become an affiliate of the new Fox network not too many years later.

This was also at a time when many US TV Markets were swapping network affiliations with their competitors. I remember when WBIR-TV was CBS; WATE was NBC; and WTVK was ABC.

Eric
Click to expand...
Actually, Channel 8 did not come on the air until 1988, not 1980. Iirc, the owners of WTVK-TV 26 had been trying for a number of years thier signal from UHF 26 to VHF 8, to try and increase viewership. I lived in the county at the time, and while we could could easliy pick up both Channels 6 and 10 with an outdoor antena, we were never able to get a clear picture without any graininess from Channel 26 on a consistant basis. And majority of neighbors had the same problem.
 
26 and 8 simulcasted for a short period, not sure if it was a couple of weeks or just a couple of days. I just remember thinking it was really cool that the sumrfs were on both 26 and 8 one Saturday morning. There was a pretty solid media campaign, I remember that even though I was probably only 5 or 6 at the time, there were ads and bilboards everywhere.
 
eacalhoun1 said:
*Why didn't TV26 stay on the air as an Independent? It would've likely become an affiliate of the new Fox network not too many years later.

Eric
Click to expand...
Channel 43 came on the air in Knoxville in January 1984 as Knoxville's first independent television station. WTVK-TV 26 was still the NBC affiliate for Knoxville at the time. FOX debuted in the Spring 1987. I'm not sure if Channel 43 became the FOX affiliate right away, but they were the FOX affiliate in Knoxville by the time Channel 26 became Channel 8 in the Fall 1988. Channel 8 was NBC for about a week, then became the CBS affiliate with NBC moving to Channel 10. This was in Fall 1988, not 1980.
 
Channel 8 was one of two drop-in VHF channels in the country at time time. It had to be directional to protect Channel 8 in Nashville, thus the crummy signal to the west.

Applications for Channel 8 were taken under the old pre-auction rules. South Central owned Channel 26 and filed for it, but a local group of consisting of an accountant, lawyer, government employee, former Olympic Athlete and Sequoyah Hills socialite had the comparitive points to win the application, because they were local and had a minority partner and a woman partner. So South Central formed a partnership with that group, took 26 off the air and became a limited partner of the new ownership group. They also leased tower and studio space on Sharp's Ridge to Channel 8 for a few years. Eventually South Central was bought out, and then the other owners sold out. There was a low power station on Channel 26 for years.

I think South Central did pretty well in that arrangement, and the other owners cashed out OK when they sold. WKXT eventually wanted out from under their South Central rent so they moved to another tower and built studios on Papermill, freeing South Central to consolidate radio on Sharp's Ridge.
 
But South Central is again a player in the Knoxville TV market, aren't they? Don't they own and operate WKXT-DT/7, which is a full power digital independent in Knoxville. I'd love to know how channel 7 was allocated to Knoxville and how South Central came to get it. Of course, 7 could never be operated as an analog station, with WVLT on adjacent channel 8 and Spartanburg7 very shortspaced. Regarding WTVK/26---I remember watching during trips to Oak Ridge with my parents in the 60s. Yes, 26 was always a little snowy, while 6 and 10 were clear, but I was always fascinated with 26 since I wasn't too familiar with UHF stations at the time.
 
jwk1979 said:
Channel 8 was NBC for about a week, then became the CBS affiliate with NBC moving to Channel 10. This was in Fall 1988, not 1980.
Click to expand...

Here's another detail from the transition. During the week of the switch from Channel 26 to Channel 8, the station aired no local newscasts. There was tower work happening at that time (antenna swap) and they wanted to minimize the risk to employees and keep the facility on Sharp's Ridge as uninhabited as possible in case something should fall off of the tower!
 
Now, I was only 11 at the time, but I was still all excited about the change. I do not remember a 8/26 simulcast. I thought that 26 went off, the antennea was replaced on the same spot on the tower and 8 went on. I also seem to remember some sort of delay, because they did not have all of the proper equipment.

I also do not remember 8 being NBC at any point. I thought that it was 26 that was CBS for about a week, then the switch to 8 came next. I remember WTVK actually changing their logo to a boring typeface 'WTVK' for that short period of time. The previous logo had the curved part of the '2' make up the right angle part of the 'K'. I have heard that WTVK was one of the few stations in America to be affiliated with all three big-three networks at some point in its life.

It seems like Knoxville was without a CBS station for a little over a week.

Again, I was young and a lot has happened since then. Does anyone else remember it the way I did.
 
kjallen said:
It seems like Knoxville was without a CBS station for a little over a week.

Again, I was young and a lot has happened since then. Does anyone else remember it the way I did.
Click to expand...

I believe that 26/8 was cable and low-power only during the transition week.
 
Some Good Knoxville TV History

It's good that everybody has had a chance to live through a VHF channel drop-in.. My history research goes back a lot farther.. back in 1953, when there were only two channels in Knoxville, a VHF Channel 6 and a UHF Channel 26.
There had been a race to see which VHF station would claim the honor of being the first station in East Tennessee, that race being between the Mountcastle Group, who had gotten the license for Channel 6, and the Lancaster-Birdwell group in Johnson City, who had won the license for Channel 11. The Channel 6 folks won the race, because the tower the Johnson City folks were building collapsed, and threw them behind sign-on schedule. The Knoxville VHF station was affiliated with NBC primary and ABC secondary, and the UHF was affiliated with CBS primary and ABC secondary. The Mountcastle Group selected the call letters WROL-TV after their radio station. The Knoxville UHF station Channel 26 owned by John Englebrecht chose the calls WTSK-TV. Three years later, two groups applied for a license to operate on Channel 10. They were Scripps-Howard, which already owned one of Knoxville's two newspapers and also WNOX-AM and FM Radio; and the Hart-Birdwell Group (the same Birdwell who helped put the Channel 11 on the air in Johnson City). Scripps-Howard was so sure the FCC would award them the license that they went ahead and built a radio-television studio off Whittle Springs Pike (the building is still standing today).. But the FCC eventually awarded the license to the Hart-Birdwell group, because Jay Birdwell convinced the FCC commissioners that the monopoly of one company owning two radio stations, one TV station and one of the two newspapers in town, would not be in the community's best interest. After the Channel 10 license was awarded to the Hart-Birdwell group, the station's call-letters were picked from his last name: WBIR-TV, which went along with the radio stations he also had an interest in: WBIR-AM and FM. When WBIR-TV signed on, their tower was on top of Sharp's Ridge (the 800-foot tower is still standing), alongside WATE-TV's old 800-foot tower (it was taken down when the 1,153-foot tower was built beside it). In the early 60's, the owners of WBIR-TV wanted to built a tower on House Mountain, one of the highest mountains nearby. They never got to build on House Mountain, because the owners of WATE-TV (their biggest competitor) went in and bought the only property on top of House Mountain that would support a 800-foot TV tower. WATE-TV then convinced the other owners, their new neighbors, not to sell their land to WBIR-TV because the tower would lower their land values. As a result of this shifty move, WBIR-TV was forced to build a huge 1,751-foot TV tower in the surrounding valley near House Mountain, to make up for the natural height they lost by not being able to build on House. They were helped in this endeavour when WJHL-TV, Channel 11 in Johnson City moved its tower from Buffalo Mountain near downtown, to Holston Mountain, 30 air miles away. That gave Channel 10 the spacing distance to not cause co-channel interference. Ask me how WETP-TV Channel 2, ended up on Short Mountain between Knoxville and Kingsport (that's an interesting story, too).

Calvin Sneed
 
Funny you should ask LOL!
The big VHF allocation shake-up of 1952 left Knoxville with commercial channels 6 and 10, Johnson City with commercial channel 11, and Bristol, VA with commercial Channel 5. With commercial Channel 2's already on the air in Atlanta, Greensboro and Nashville, the FCC determined that there was one other particular space right between all three, where a Channel 2 could be dropped in at full power.

That location was Short Mountain, outside Mooresburg, Tennessee, exactly halfway between Knoxville and the Tri-Cities.

Because of the halfway distance, a commercial network-affiliated station would not survive, so the FCC allocated Channel 2, Short Mountain as a non-commercial educational station, with the city of license Sneedville.. The Tenneseee Board of Education launched WSJK-TV on the Channel 2 Short Mountain site in 1962.. its full-power, 100,000 ERP (effective radiated power) signal can and does still reach both DMA's with a grade A signal from its 466-foot tower, although it ghosts between hills and ridges in those communities.

Because of the same-channel separation that has to be maintained with Atlanta, Nashville and Greensboro, the Channel 2 cannot EVER be moved off Short Mountain for any reason, not even 100 feet in any direction.. A WATE-TV engineer friend of mine once told me, if Channel 2 ever moved to Knoxville (Sharp's Ridge, where all their TV stations are), he estimated that it would have to cut power in half (down to 50,000 watts visual ERP) to avoid interference with WSB-TV, Atlanta.. if it moved to Tri-Cities (Holston Mountain, where all their TV stations are), it would have to reduce power by two-thirds (down to 33,000 watts visual ERP) to avoid interference with WFMY-TV, Greensboro. With both situations, any move would be well within the 180 air mile minimum distance of same-channel separation for low VHF's in the Southeast, and the resulting moves would mean a very diminished signal for the city it moves to, making that move uneconomical and ineffective. The ERP drop would be exponential, the farther the Channel 2 antenna moves away from Short Mountain.

As a result, the FCC calls Short Mountain, Tennessee "an island," and that's why Channel 2 has, and always will be, located there. Sorry for the technical explanation, but there are only three other "islands" like that in the entire country that fit that category.

Digital channels have changed all of that, in fact, revolutionizing the way channels are allocated. You could HAVE a digital Channel 2 both in Knoxville and Tri-Cities. That's why Knoxville has a digital Channel 7.. if that were an analog Channel 7, the folks at WSPA-TV, Spartanburg, South Carolina and WDBJ-TV, Roanoke, would be screaming bloody murder and the FCC would be grabbing your first-born child.

---Calvin Sneed
 
Reading this history is TRULY fascinating...I did not know WSJK (Ch 2) was so short-spaced and locked into their current location. Reading this took me back to when I was a child in the early 70s visiting my grandma near Bakersville, NC. Channel 2 and Channel 6 (WATE) were the two best signals she received, and I always watched Channel 2 to get my Sesame Street, Mr Rogers, etc fix. It's funny that in the late 70s she moved about .1 mile -- then all she could get was WBTV and WSOC Charlotte.
 
I'm still trying to understand what led the FCC to allocate digital channel 7 to Knoxville. I would think that IT DOES present a good bit of interferrence to channel 7 Spartanburg. Could Spartan Radiocasting have been interested in applying for that permit? Otherwise, I think they would have hollared bloody murder. I think its interesting that South Central, former owners of WTVK/26, ended up owners of Knoxville channel 7.
 
East Tennessee television has a very storied history.. there's plenty more that it would take volumes to write about.. I found all of this out while working at WATE-TV back in the 70's and 80's. Before they all passed away, all those old radio engineers were just fountains of good information.. they helped put all those radio and TV stations on the air back in the , and thank goodness, many of them felt the histories should be passed down to people that could verify the information, and keep it from an historic perspective..

There was so much politics involved in TV back in the day.. it's stuff that would get you fired these days, but it put good TV on the air and kept it there.
 
The space between digital Channel 7 and analog channel 7 is so great, that the digital 7 could transmit underneath WSPA on Hogback Mountain in South Carolina, and they not interfere with each other. It's a completely different spectrum. Too much bandwith difference. There have been instances where digital transmissions have interferred with AM and FM transmissions in that spectrum, but there have been no reports with the FCC where any digital stations have inteferred with analog stations.
 
I thought Channel 2 in Nashville was originally
educational and that ABC was on Channel 8,
and that they swapped channels in the middle
of prime time one night in 1973. That would
have nothing to do with WSJK's location, but
I do have one question: in the old Bristol/
Kingsport/Johnson City edition of TV Guide,
WSJK was shown as black "2" on a white
background, same as the Knoxville, Asheville,
and Hazard stations. Does this mean that
WSJK is considered a Knoxville station, even
though it was listed as Sneedville?
 
I have always been suprised that the FCC dropped in channel 8 in Knoxville with there already being an 8 in Charleston WV and Nashville. Have there been any interference issues over the years. I remember watching the antennas being switched out.

Years ago the old channel 57 in Hazard KY was WKYH channel 57. I am fairly certain that they got their network feeds thru WCYB in Bristol because sometimes I would see Bristol commercials on WKYH. I gues someone forgot to flip the switch. I have always heard that when the new channel 57 WYMT was built the new owners wanted a VHF signal but there were very few channels left. 4, 7, 9, and 12. Not sure what the deal was on 4 and 7 but spacing problems on 9 and 12 because of Cincinnati and Chatanooga. WYMT has finally gotten their wish thou. Digital 12.
 
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