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WCWM Williamsburg License Cancelled

R

RF101

William & Mary College administration just killed the license for WCWM. No attempt was made to downgrade the signal to just serve the campus area. How much you want to bet another NCE station will expand into the 90.9 former coverage area?
 
This is odd. Isn't there some retail value to this station? WCWM is powered at 13,500 watts. The tower is not that tall, 269 ft (85 m). But the station still covers a sizable population of communities between Norfolk and Richmond. It's in the non-commercial section of the FM band at 90.9 MHz. But you'd think a non-commercial broadcaster would buy it from the college.

OK, it's not going to command millions of dollars. But it has some monetary worth, right?
 
Usually there's at least some public reaction when a college station with good programming and a powerful signal such as this one shuts down, but apart from the FCC filing there is zero indication that anything has changed with WCWM.

The station's website and social media look like business as usual with no shutdown notice or hint of any changes posted. Regular programming, with routine mentions of being at 90.9 FM, continues at the Listen Live streaming link. Other than the dcrtv post reporting the FCC filing, there don't seem to be any news articles about a shutdown of the station, including nothing at William & Mary's official news outlet, news.wm.edu, or its student nuewspaper flathatnews. There are no other social media posts to be found mentioning it on facebook, xitter, bluesky, threads, reddit r/Williamsburg or r/williamandmary.

It's like it never happened. Did it?
 
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WCWM had moved to their last facility in Charles City County about 10-15 years ago. I do believe it was designed so another station in Hampton Roads could improve their facilities. They went with the B1 facility that just barely covered Williamsburg proper with its city-grade signal and actually had a 50w booster at its old on-campus transmitter facility. Before that it was a couple hundred watts and covered Williamsburg proper pretty well.

My guess is they were a tenant on a tower (I’m guessing the old WDCK 96.5 tower when it was still licensed to Williamsburg) and the cost of rent plus the growing apathy of college kids to FM radio was the death knell.

That being said, if the station was sold, they’d lose the booster site in the city proper. You really need that booster site to cover Williamsburg well. Doubtful the college admin would permit a religious station to use their facilities at that point. Their main signal in Charles City Co. doesn’t cover much at all…it was directional towards Richmond which meant it couldn’t be listened to in the nearby eastern Henrico suburbs/RIC airport area. And unless something major has changed in the past decade since I last drove through those parts, Charles City County is pretty much nothing but swamps and home to a mega-dump taking a large amount of DC/NYC/Richmond’s refuse.

On paper, this sounds puzzling. In reality, the signal wasn’t really much to write home about and would’ve been sold for a pittance.
 


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