• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Friday, May 16, 2025
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links
No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

No products in the cart.

No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
No Result
View All Result

Site of the Week 4/26/2013: Gainesville and Starke, Florida, 2011

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
April 26, 2013
in Big Trip 2011, Florida, Free Content, Tower Site of the Week
3

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

When we left off last week, we were telling you about the unusual spread of broadcast outlets at the University of Florida in Gainesville: its students operate commercially-licensed WRUF 850 and WRUF-FM 103.7, doing sports and country, respectively, but it also has professionally-run public outlets WUFT-TV and WUFT-FM and a low-power TV license, WRUF-LD (RF 5/virtual 10) to boot.

WRUF's Quonset hut
WRUF’s Quonset hut

WRUF 850
WRUF 850
WYKS 105.3
WYKS 105.3
The WYKS antenna
The WYKS antenna

As we kick off this final installment of our Florida trip, we’re heading from the WRUF-FM/WUFT site on the northwest side of town back down I-75 to the southwest side of town and Gainesville’s oldest radio station.

WRUF (850) has been in town since 1928, when the university bought a license that had been iu use over in St. Petersburg. It settled down on 830 at first, moving to 850 in the 1941 NARBA shift, and soon afterward jumped to 5000 watts in power and relocated from the university campus to a then-remote rural area west of town.

Today, that stretch of SW 75th Street is known as “Tower Road,” and it runs on the west side of the four-tower AM 850 array in what’s now a suburban area just west of I-75.

The transmitter building out here is a Quonset hut, and I’ll bet there’s plenty of history inside.

(By way of programming, WRUF’s AM facility had just recently flipped to all-sports when we visited in 2011; it’s now part of an ESPN simulcast with Ocala’s WMOP 900, with University of Florida students providing local sports updates.)

Follow Tower Road south from the WRUF site and turn eastward on SW 24th Avenue and you’ll come to Gainesville’s second-oldest FM. WYKS (105.3) started out in 1970 as WGVL on 105.5 and spent most of the 1970s as a progressive rocker before becoming “Kiss” in 1981. It moved down the dial to 105.3 in 1995 to allow a big upgrade for the 105.5 signal in New Port Richey, down in the Tampa Bay area, but WYKS remained a class A signal all along.

WGGG 1230
WGGG 1230

WGGG's Gator-colored tower
WGGG’s Gator-colored tower

At this point, let’s jump over to the east side of town to see Gainesville’s other AMs and a couple more FMs:

At 1230 NE Waldo Road, the main drag heading out of town (as Florida 24) to the northeast, we find the mortal remains of Gainesville’s second AM. The city of Gainesville put WGGG (1230) on the air in 1948 from this lovely Art Deco facility. The tower out back supposedly came from the University of Florida campus, where it had been one of the two original support towers for the WRUF longwire antenna; in later years, it was painted in Florida Gators orange and green, and the peeling remains of that paint job are still barely visible here.

WGGG led the market into the 1970s, but was overtaken by FM and fell on hard times; by the late 1980s, it had abandoned this facility and now transmits from a short tower hidden deep in the trees in a suburban area on the west side of town, where we looked for it but couldn’t see it in the woods. In 2011, WGGG was simulcasting ESPN Radio with WMOP down in Ocala; after ESPN moved to WRUF, I’m not sure what WGGG is doing these days, if it’s on the air at all.

WXJZ 100.9
WXJZ 100.9

WDVH 980/WTMN 1430
WDVH 980/WTMN 1430

WBXY 99.5
WBXY 99.5

WBXY's antenna
WBXY’s antenna
Old WDVH studios
Old WDVH studios

Head south from the old WGGG site down Waldo Road and it turns into SE 11th Street, and eventually brings us to the tower that’s home to Gainesville’s 100.9 FM signal. Today it’s known as WXJZ and is part of the Asterisk Communications family – but it started out in the early 1980s as beautiful music WMFM. It later became WYGC, simulcasting Asterisk’s country WTRS from Dunnellon/Ocala, before swapping calls and formats with smooth jazz WXJZ 104.9 out in High Springs.

Also out this way, pretty far out on the southeast edge of town on SE 27th Street, is a diplexed AM site: WDVH (980) and WTMN (1430). WDVH traces its history back to 1954, when it signed on out here as a 5,000-watt daytimer, later adding 170 watts at night. It changed calls for a time in the 1980s, but reclaimed its heritage identity a few years later, and when we came to town in 2011 it was doing classic country, simulcasting with WDVH-FM (101.7 Trenton) way out to the west of Gainesville.

Another AM station came on here as a very late-to-the-game daytimer, probably one of the very last daytimers ever to be licensed: WTMN (1430) signed on in 1988 as a 2500-watt signal diplexed with WDVH, later powering up to 10,000 watts. WTMN, WDVH and a passel of outlying FM signals ended up in the hands of New York-based Pamal Communications, which sold them to a new owner in 2012.

We couldn’t get to the tower of Gainesville’s final AM, WAJD (1390), back in a stand of trees behind a residential area east of town, so we finish up our look at Gainesville up on the north side of town, on NW 93rd Avenue just off NW 13th Street (US 441/FL 20). This location was the original WGFL (Channel 53) studio and analog transmitter site, and while WGFL has moved, the tower is now home to Asterisk’s WBXY (99.5 La Crosse).

WEAG's building
WEAG’s building

WEAG's transmitter room
WEAG’s transmitter room
WEAG's tower
WEAG’s tower
WEAG-FM
WEAG-FM

There’s a lot more for us to see if we ever make it back to Gainesville: there are several outlying FM sites we didn’t make it to, not to mention the WUFT and WRUF studios on the University of Florida campus and the studios of several commercial clusters in town.

But with a plane to catch 75 miles away in Jacksonville, we had to say farewell to Gator Town and make our way up US 301 to the northeast – and we had to do it without speeding, since that stretch of road connecting Gainesville to Jacksonville contains two of the best-known speed traps in the country, the small towns of Waldo and Starke.

Starke, at least, also includes a nifty radio facility. “You should go see WEAG while you’re passing through,” was the repeated advice we got on the way out of Gainesville (right before “and watch your speed in Waldo!”)

Why was it so important to stop in and see this little simulcast country combo, which included kilowatt fulltimer WEAG (1490) and FM sister WEAG-FM (106.3)? Because these stations, deep in the heart of Florida, have some interesting roots up on NERW’s home turf: after starting out as AM standalone WRJR in the fifties, 1490 became WPXE and then spawned WPXE-FM in the seventies.

In 1984, Philadelphia broadcaster Ben Dickerson moved down here and bought WPXE/WPXE-FM, relaunching them as “The Eagle,” WEAG, in the mold of Philly top-40 flamethrower WEGX (106.1). Over the years, it morphed into AC and then to the country format it was running when we stopped by.

WEAG's studio
WEAG’s studio

WEAG production room
WEAG production room

And are we ever glad we did! Not only did we enjoy a nice visit with Ben and some great stories about his days at legendary Philadelphia stations such as WCAU…we also found out that right before we walked in, morning man/GM Chuck Kramer (another northeast radio veteran) had been telling Ben about the Tower Site Calendar. Needless to say, we all had plenty to talk about while touring WEAG’s studio/transmitter facility, and Ben and Chuck ended up with some new decorations on the wall before we pointed the rental car (slowly!) up the road to Jacksonville and home.

(One follow-up here: late last year, the WEAG AM license was returned to the FCC, so now “Eagle Country” is flying FM-only in Starke.)

Thanks to Lee Freshwater and WEAG’s Chuck Kramer and Ben Dickerson for the tours!

It’s 2013! Do you have your Tower Site Calendar 2013 yet? We’ve still got some left, and they’re shipping right away from the all new Fybush.com store! Order now and your wall can be festooned with Florida and much more all through 2013. (We’ve also got the very last FM Atlas copies available for sale, and the new edition of the National Radio Club’s AM Log.)

Want access to more than a dozen years’ worth of Tower Site of the Week? All our archives, fully searchable, are available to Fybush.com subscribers – and you get full access to NorthEast Radio Watch, too! Subscriptions start at just $15. Sign up here!

And don’t miss a batch of Gainesville IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: RTE Radio Center, Dublin, Ireland, 2011

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
Tags: WBXYWDVHWEAGWEAG-FMWGGGWRUFWTMNWXJZWYGCWYKS
Previous Post

NERW 4/22/2013: Boston Media’s Nightmare Week

Next Post

NERW 4/29/2013: CBC’s Kitchener-Waterloo License Goof

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

Editor/Publisher, NorthEast Radio Watch and Tower Site of the Week

Related Posts

Top of the Tower Podcast #062: Keeping Students in Broadcasting
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #062: Keeping Students in Broadcasting

In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we continue bringing...

by Scott Fybush
May 14, 2025
NERW 12/15/2014: CRTC Drains Niagara Simulcast
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/12/2025: New Owners For Two AMs

In this week’s issue… Catsimatidis, Shula add signals - Radiodays rocks Toronto - Ex-Bell, Evanov stations rebrand By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT - MA - RI - CT - NY - NJ - PA -...

by Scott Fybush
May 13, 2025
Top of the Tower Podcast #061: Rob Bertrand at NAB/PREC 2025
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #061: Rob Bertrand at NAB/PREC 2025

Top of the Tower talks with Inrush Broadcast's Rob Bertrand about the future of broadcast engineering as a service

by Scott Fybush
May 6, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 5/5/2025: Public Media’s Uncertain Future
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/5/2025: Public Media’s Uncertain Future

In this week’s issue… Public media faces a CPB-less future - Elections change broadcasters' fates - Another AM goes silent - K-Love buys in PA, Holy Family sells in Mass. - Bell hands off Peterborough stations

by Scott Fybush
May 5, 2025
Next Post
NERW 4/29/2013: CBC’s Kitchener-Waterloo License Goof

NERW 4/29/2013: CBC's Kitchener-Waterloo License Goof

Please login to join discussion

Log In

Join Now | Lost Password?

Get Fybush.com Updates

Get Fybush.com updates emailed directly to your inbox!

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.