• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Tuesday, July 8, 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 8/1/2014: A Western NY Grab Bag

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
August 1, 2014
in Free Content, New York, Tower Site of the Week
3

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

It’s been more than 35 years since your editor first walked in the door of a broadcast facility, and one of the small joys of having been at this so long is getting to see those facilities evolve and keep evolving in and around my hometown of Rochester, New York.

This week’s edition is a little bit of a “grab bag” of quick visits from late 2012, updating some familiar spots that had been going through technical evolution along the way.

In the WIVB studio
In the WIVB studio

News desk, closer
News desk, closer

Take, for instance, the venerable building just down the road at 2077 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. NBC built this structure in the late 1950s for its ill-fated attempt at a UHF owned-and-operated station, WBUF-TV (Channel 17), but when a third VHF signal came on the air in the Queen City, NBC shut down channel 17 and sold the facility to Buffalo’s oldest TV station, WBEN-TV (Channel 4), which has been there ever since. These days, channel 4 is WIVB, and when we stopped by in 2012 it had recently completed a big HD studio and control room buildout. That’s the new news set above, and below at left is the new HD production control room. (Master control is a few hundred miles away at LIN’s hub in Springfield, Massachusetts.)

WIVB control room
WIVB control room

Second studio
Second studio

The smaller second studio at WIVB had also just been through a rebuild, becoming the new home of the “Winging It! Buffalo Style” entertainment show that airs in midmornings on WIVB’s sister station WNLO (Channel 23).

WBBZ at the mall
WBBZ at the mall

WBBZ control room
WBBZ control room

But that one bit of non-news programming is nothing compared to what’s coming out of one of the city’s smallest and newest stations. WBBZ-TV is the descendant of what started in the 1990s as WNGS-TV (Channel 67), a tiny UHF operation out of rural Springville, 20 miles or so south of Buffalo. WNGS went through some hard times, ending up with Equity Broadcasting and then Daystar before going completely dark during the DTV transition. But instead of dying completely, it found its way into the hands of Buffalo broadcasting veteran Phil Arno, who rebuilt it as a very local, very interesting operation indeed.

WBBZ's big green screen
WBBZ’s big green screen

Audience seating
Audience seating

WBBZ found a new digital home on RF 7, vacated by WKBW-TV, and secured cable carriage on channel 5 across most of the market. And speaking of WKBW, Arno hired longtime channel 7 programming/news director John DiSciullo to run “Buffalo’s Buzz” from its new home in a vacant storefront at the Eastern Hills Mall.

The old WKGS antenna
The old WKGS antenna

In 2012, you don’t need a lot of equipment to make a TV station look good. This is a simple but effective setup: enter the offices from the door to the left of the storefront studio and you go down a long hallway into an office space with a small, largely automated master control in one corner. That space connects to an equally small but effective production control room next to the studio. That audience seating really gets used, as WBBZ brings visitors in from the mall to serve as a live audience for local productions that include a sports show, talk shows and even a local game show, all interspersed among the MeTV programming that fills the rest of the broadcast day.

It’s a neat model for local TV, and here’s hoping Arno and DiSciullo and the crew at WBBZ can make it work over the long term!

Back home, we had another big move to check out, thanks to Clear Channel. Its purchase of Jacor had included one of the Rochester FMs that was dropped into the dial in the heady years of the Docket 80-90 expansion. WKGS (106.7 Irondequoit) had started out in the hands of Auburn Cablevision, which put the signal on the air in 1992 as AAA-formatted WMAX-FM.

Ironically for Auburn Cablevision, it was an Auburn-licensed signal, WPHR (106.9), that severely limited where the 106.7 could be dropped in. It signed on from a transmitter site up at the northern end of the market, high atop the Seneca Towers apartment building perched next to the Genesee River just a few miles south of Lake Ontario, below the ridge that separates the lakefront from the higher elevations in the rest of the market. Auburn Cablevision tried to rectify the signal weakness by purchasing the class A signal on 102.3 in Canandaigua, southeast of Rochester, but Clear Channel eventually split that frequency off with separate programming.

WKGS in the apartment
WKGS in the apartment

View out the window
View out the window

But then Clear Channel made a big change over in the Syracuse market: having also acquired that 106.9 signal in Auburn, Clear downgraded it from B to B1 and shifted it much closer to downtown Syracuse as WSYR-FM, a relay of news-talk WSYR (570). That opened up expansion potential for several other upstate stations: in Binghamton, it allowed another class A drop-in at 106.7 to move into the heart of the market. And in Rochester, it allowed WKGS to move south from Seneca Towers, which means we had to get up and see the old site there before the big move.

When then-WMAX built up here, it did so in a nifty, inconspicuous way. Aside from the two-bay antenna that went up atop the elevator penthouse, you’d barely have known the station was in the building. Its “transmitter room” was a converted studio apartment on the 22nd (and top) floor of the building, with the kitchen ripped out. The transmitter racks occupied what would have been the living room, with some extra cooling added next to the window looking eastward along the Route 104 expressway.

WKGS in its new home
WKGS in its new home

WKGS' new antenna
WKGS’ new antenna

That Energy-Onix shown above was the original WMAX-FM transmitter, and it kept 106.7 going from Seneca Towers while its newer replacement, the BE shown directly above, was relocated to its new home in the old AT&T building on Pinnacle Hill. As we showed you in a 2007 installment of this column, that building was divided up, with one side becoming the DTV home of Fox affiliate WUHF (Channel 31/RF 28) and the other side becoming home to what were then CBS Radio’s WCMF (96.5) and WPXY (97.9). A small space in the front of that FM room became the new home of WKGS’ transmitter, with a new directional panel antenna going up on the tower next to the building. (The Energy-Onix later joined the BE here.)

And so it came to pass that both of Rochester’s top-40 archrivals, WPXY and “Kiss” WKGS, ended up sharing a single transmitter room, without as much as a chain-link enclosure dividing them. Isn’t radio fun?

Thanks to Dennis Majewicz, late of WIVB/WNLO, WBBZ’s John DiSciullo and Clear Channel Rochester’s engineering team for the tours!

SPRING IS HERE…

And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!

If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!

This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.

And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future. 

Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).

We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.

The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?) 

Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too! 

 


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

Next week: The new KBRT 740, above Orange County, California

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: WBBZ-TVWIVBWKGSWNLO
Previous Post

NERW Update: Hartford Radio’s Weird Summer

Next Post

NERW 8/4/2014: Another Independent Goes Down

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

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

Related Posts

NorthEast Radio Watch 7/7/2025: Boston Mourns LB
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 7/7/2025: Boston Mourns LB

In this week’s issue… Remembering Boston's Lyndon Byers - CRTC approves Rogers, Evanov spins - Towers come down in PA, and might go up in NY - More FM moves in Ontario

by Scott Fybush
July 7, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/23-30/2025: Another Great Day in Alpine
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 6/23-30/2025: Another Great Day in Alpine

In this week’s issue… Honoring radio's greatest inventor - Maine morning vet retiring - Buffalo names new HOF inductees - PA's Loftus retires

by Scott Fybush
June 30, 2025
Top of the Tower Podcast #65: Back and Forth With PA’s Jason Togyer
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #65: Back and Forth With PA’s Jason Togyer

In this week's episode - Top of the Tower is back with a new spring/summer season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio! This week, it's another joint episode, a two-way chat with my good friend Jason...

by Scott Fybush
June 22, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/16/2025: Townsquare, Corus Cut Deeper
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 6/16/2025: Townsquare, Corus Cut Deeper

In this week’s issue… Oneonta signals go dark - Whiteoaks takes over in Niagara - Corus empties Ottawa studios - CBS-FM shuffles talent - Armstrong anniversary to be honored

by Scott Fybush
June 16, 2025
Next Post
NERW Update: Hartford Radio’s Weird Summer

NERW 8/4/2014: Another Independent Goes Down

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.