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May 15-22, 2003
Charlotte, N.C.: Everything But WBT
Last week, we gazed longingly at the three
Blaw-Knox diamond towers that are a unique hallmark of Charlotte's
WBT (1110). To most radio listeners outside central North Carolina,
that's about all there is to Charlotte radio - but in fact there's
a little more to see down here in the Queen City of the Carolinas
- and we spent a day or so doing just that back in March.
 Our "Queen City
for the Day" experience actually began about 20 miles to
the west, over in the hills of Gaston County, just north of the
town of Dallas, N.C. Skipping the several small AM stations of
Dallas and nearby Gastonia (and, inexplicably, even managing
to miss a legal ID from one of them), we headed to the big TV
towers that dot the hills up here. The WBTV (Channel 3) tower
is typical of the genre: channel 3 up top, WLNK (107.9) just
below, and WBTV-DT (Channel 23) side-mounted below that. Nearby
towers are home to WB affiliate WWWB (Channel 55, licensed to
Rock Hill, S.C., and sharing its stick with FM stations WNKS
95.1 Charlotte, WWMG 96.1 Shelby and WPEG 97.9 Gastonia) and
to NBC affiliate WCNC (Channel 36/DTV 22).
 With some time still
remaining before the arrival of our tower-hunting colleague Garrett
Wollman, we pointed the rental NERW-mobile (a beat-up Mitsubishi
with Pennsylvania plates, an unfortunate bit of chance that would
prove significant later) to the east, past Charlotte and heading
north to the fast-growing Concord-Kannapolis area.
Kannapolis is probably best known as the hometown of Dale
Earnhardt (how much did they love him there? So much so that
after his death, state highway 136 through town was renamed state
highway 3, Dale Earnhardt Boulevard), but our interest here is
in a couple of AM stations. WRKB (1460 Kannapolis) is a nondescript
stick on a side street in Kannapolis (once home to the 99.7 FM
facility that's now Charlotte-market WRFX), but WEGO (1410 Concord)
is a little more interesting: it's on a tall tower right alongside
US 29 west of downtown Concord. (Concord was also once home to
an 870 daytimer with the calls WGTL, but it's long gone and few
traces remain.)
Closer inspection of WEGO's site (not to mention the sign
out front) shows us that the FM bays on top of the tower used
to be WPEG, before it moved out to Dallas; the big concrete-block
building turns out to have been the former studios of WPEG and,
at least for a time, WBAV (101.9 Gastonia). These days, both
stations are owned by Infinity and operate from studios near
downtown Charlotte, and the building is rather vacant.
After that, it's time to head to the Charlotte airport to
pick up Garrett - and then it's a quick sweep around the towers
of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County itself.
 Our
first destination is the Newell area, northeast of Charlotte,
home to the rest of the market's TV and FM stations. Public station
WTVI (Channel 42) is the northeasternmost stick, shared with
WRFX (99.7 Kannapolis); a couple of miles to the south sit two
towers on Hood Road with an interesting history. The building
at the base of the towers is larger than you'd expect these days
- and some checking of old Broadcasting Yearbooks when we return
home confirms our guess that this was the original studio and
tower of Charlotte's Channel 36, back in the days when it was
independent WRET, owned by one Robert E. Turner, who you may
know better by his nickname, "Ted."
R.E. Turner sold WRET to Westinghouse, which turned it into
NBC affiliate WPCQ; later, it would take the calls WCNC and move
to fancy studio digs south of town and the former channel 9 tower
in Dallas. We'll catch up with 36 later; in the meantime, we
note that this site (now owned by our friends at SpectraSite)
is now home to public radio WFAE (90.7), country WSOC-FM (103.7)
and 80s hits WSSS (104.7).
 Just a short drive
to the west are the new site of WSOC-TV (Channel 9/DTV 34) and
its Kannapolis-licensed duopoly partner WAXN (Channel 64/DTV
50) - and just around the corner, Fox affiliate WCCB (Channel
18/DTV 27). They're very tall and don't photograph well...so
we make a stop for lunch and head on to the AMs.
First up is the second-best AM signal in town (although after
WBT, there really isn't a number two or three in this relatively
AM-poor market.) Today, 610 on the Charlotte dial is home to
sports radio WFNZ, but that's not the way anyone really remembers
this signal.
No, 610 in Charlotte is and will always be "Big WAYS,"
the callsign the station used from 1941 until 1984 - for much
of that time the number one top-40 station in the region. You
can learn more about the heyday of WAYS at this
neat site (there's some fun material here about other Charlotte
stations, too.)
 WAYS used four towers
on Radio Road, northwest of downtown Charlotte - and those four
widely-spaced towers are still there, accompanied by the tower
that was once a primary for its 95.1 sister station and a studio
building that looks like a concrete bunker from the street but
shows a wall of glass windows facing the towers.
AM 610 went through numerous incarnations after its WAYS days
were over - "Q-61" WROQ(AM), oldies WAES, a period
of simulcasting WRFX 99.7 (which also used these studios), and
several others before landing with sports in 1995.
FM 95.1 struggled as well after a period as WROQ-FM, eventually
ending up with top 40 as WNKS, "Kiss 95.1"; it and
610 would also end up in the Infinity cluster here in due time.
Most of the rest of the Charlotte AM dial is also clustered
northwest of downtown; heading south from 610, our next stop
is at the third-best AM signal in town (which, again, isn't saying
that much in this land of poor soil conductivity), the 5000 watt
day/1000 watt night signal on 930 that was known for so many
years as WSOC, one of the core stations of Cox Broadcasting.
 In 1992, Cox sold
WSOC(AM), keeping WSOC-FM 103.7 (the premier country station
in town) and WSOC-TV 9; the buyer was the Bible Broadcasting
Network, which relocated its headquarters to Charlotte and turned
the signal into religious WYFQ. (It would later add simulcast
WYFQ-FM 93.5, east of town in Wadesboro.)
WYFQ's three towers are in an industrial area on Tar Heel
Road, west of I-85 and hard to photograph, especially with the
sun in the way!
Just a mile or so away, also alongside I-85, are two nondescript
short sticks that belong to black gospel WOGR (1540). WOGR is
part of "WordNet," which includes simulcasts on WADE
(1340) in Wadesboro, WGAS (1420) in South Gastonia and a little
class D FM, WOGR-FM (93.3), up in Salisbury - which serves, more
than anything else, as a nominal primary for an 88.1 translator
in Harrisburg, northeast of Charlotte!
Just up the road from WOGR, behind several industrial plants
on Chesapeake Street, are four towers that belong to Charlotte's
AM 1480, a station that's had too many callsigns in its history
to even count. In the 1980s, it was Pat Robertson's WCNT, doing
conservative news and talk; later, it would take on the historic
WIST calls for a couple of years, then news-talk WTLT "Total
Radio," before ending up in 1998 as a Radio Disney outlet.
 Under Disney, 1480
is WGFY - and if that's not "Goofy," I don't know what
is.
On the other side of I-85, closer in to downtown, are two
more AM signals. A single tower in a rather unsavory-looking
neighborhood alongside the Brookshire Freeway (NC 16) is home
to WGSP (1310), now part of the Willis Broadcasting family -
which means you can listen for hours without getting a legal
ID.
(Oddly, Bishop Willis never seems to get much in the way of
fines that stick, even though the lack of legal IDs is common
at the stations he owns across the south; we did, however, tape
a very nice "WGPL Portsmouth" legal ID on WGSP - that
would be Portsmouth, Virginia, Willis' headquarters - and in
the end, we at least managed to get one ID that mentioned both
"WGSP" and "Charlotte" in the same sentence.
Close enough!)
 Just across the
freeway are the four towers of WGIV (1600), a black gospel station
owned by Infinity. WGIV has an expanded-band construction permit
for WBHE on 1660, but thus far it's shown no signs of becoming
reality.
Crossing around downtown on the I-277 loop takes us to a few
studios and one AM site: public TV WTVI at 3242 Commonwealth
Avenue, the only public television station in North Carolina
that's not part of the "UNC TV" system based in Chapel
Hill at WUNC-TV (Channel 4).
(Charlotte is unusually well-populated where public TV is
concerned; in addition to UNC TV - seen here on WUNG, Channel
58, from Concord - most viewers also get South Carolina's WNSC,
channel 15, from Rock Hill.)
Fox affiliate WCCB (Channel 18) is nearby, in a nondescript
building near the fairgrounds at "1 Television Place"
that's also the corporate headquarters of Bahakel Communications
(as well as the home of news for WOLO in Columbia, S.C., but
we'll get to that next week!) - and a few blocks away on Randolph
Road, across from the Mint Museum of Art (housed in the former
U.S. Mint building, moved out of downtown many decades ago),
is the single tower of gospel WHVN (1240), the descendant of
top-40 WIST in years gone by. (Going way back, 1240 was actually
the original home of WSOC, while WIST began on 930, but that's
beyond the scope of this little digression...)
 The modern home of
WSOC-TV (Channel 9) is a shiny glass building on North Tryon
Street north of downtown - but the rest of Charlotte's studio
action has shifted to the south.
Heading out of downtown on I-77, we pass the WNKS/WSSS studios
alongside the highway (one of two Infinity studio complexes in
town, and right next to a tower that holds auxiliary antennas
for four Clear Channel FMs!), then head around the corner to
the Wood Ridge Center office park alongside Billy Graham Parkway
(which leads to the airport).
This is where channel 36 moved when it hit the big time, becoming
WCNC and identifying itself as "channel 6," after its
cable position - the better to compete with VHF network affiliates
on channels 3 and 9. Next door to WCNC (and mostly hidden by
trees in this picture) is the headquarters of NBC News Channel,
the affiliate news service of the Peacock Network.; Clear Channel's
stations are just down the street in a bland office park building.
And that's about it for our look at Charlotte...but we're
just getting started on a weeklong voyage through the Carolinas!
Next week, we'll take you to the capital of South Carolina -
stay tuned.
 Want to see more neat sticks all year
round? The South's other Blaw-Knox, Nashville's WSM (at left)
is one of the more than a dozen Tower Site images featured in
the 2003 Tower Site Calendar, still available from Tower Site
of the Week and fybush.com.
If you liked last year's edition, you'll love this one: higher-quality
images (in addition to WSM, this year's edition includes Providence's
WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont; Buffalo's WBEN; KOMA in Oklahoma
City; WTIC, Hartford; Brookmans Park, England; WPAT, Paterson;
Four Times Square, New York; WIBC in Indianapolis; WWVA in Wheeling,
W.V.; WGN Chicago and more), more dates in radio history, a convenient
hole for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall
on the right days!
This year's edition is still available in limited quantities!
And this year, you can order with your Visa, MasterCard,
Discover or American Express by using the handy link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW/Site
of the Week subscription pledge right now: support NERW/fybush.com
at the $60 level or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar
for free! How can you go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
Thanks for your support!
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