What not many people know is that WKEF in Dayton, OH, which was the former sister station to WWLP , the call letters are Kitty Broman's initials. (Katheryn E Flynn). The sad news I heard this week is that the WKEF tower in Dayton will be coming down. There is only one tenant on it, (A radio station, WROU 92.1). WKEF now uses a DTV candelabra with two other local stations in a very neat facility.
KSTU-TV 13 in Salt Lake City, when it launched, was on UHF 20, and Bill Pepin, current GM of WWLP, was sent out there to help launch the station. KSTU was short for Springfield Television Utah (or in Utah).
WWLP holds a very rich TV history , being one of the first UHF stations to sign on the air in the US, also one of the oldest TV stations to retain a single call sign. They ran satellites in Greenfield (WRLP 32), and Worcester (WJZB, WWOR 14), and a couple of translators in Vermont. At one point WWLP had cable carriage as far north as White River Junction. When I started there in 1997, there was still a cable operator out of Vermont who carried us over the air.
And of course W69AQ, one of the first (Peter George claims THE first) "LPTV" . (A low power station airing independent programming). W69AQ used to carry the Boston sports teams via a very unique microwave-receive setup.
On the top of Coy's Hill in Warren (where WARE 1250 sites), we had a receiver with a big UHF yagi antenna aimed at WSBK-TV over the air. From Coy's Hill it was sent back via 6GHz microwave, where it then could be routed into W69AQ. The engineers in master control at the time could flip this toggle switch to turn on or off W69AQ, which at the time was only being used for sports coverage. One of the night time master control operators, however, was a big fan of Hogan's Heroes, which aired late on WSBK and would leave W69AQ turned on when he went home for the night, so he could watch it. Long after W69AQ signed off the air, we maintained a microwave link from Coys Hill, which was used to receive Boston TV. In the early 90's, the barn which housed all the equipment burned to the ground, destroying the microwave gear. After that, new gear was installed in another newer building, and we had a setup with two cable boxes and a cable feed. We could use this remote control system to switch a Adrianne video switcher with A/B outputs, between the cable box output and a small security camera aimed at the channel number on the box. The same DTMF system would then allow you to switch which channel it was on, then switch the video circuit back to the boxes' output. It was our way of getting cable service. (As at the time, there was no cable service run up Provin Mountain, where WWLP's transmitter sits. The power line access to the mountain was a 3 mile run down the spine of the mountain, only accessible via 4wheeler ATV or foot. No cable service could be run). Since then there is a new power right of way along the access road and fiber, but all the operations moved to Chicopee in 1999/2000. Leaving the only ones to go on the mountain, us engineers.
I could go on, but that is good for now...
