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Site of the Week 3/18/2016: Atlanta at the Radio Show

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
March 20, 2016
in Free Content, Georgia, Tower Site of the Week
0

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

In the last installment of our Southern Tour from September 2015, we finally arrive in Atlanta for the Radio Show – but you don’t really want to see pictures of hotel meeting rooms and show floors, do you?

WSTR's building
WSTR’s building

The WSTR lobby
The WSTR lobby

Fortunately, we had a chance to sneak away from the show for a little bit to visit with some Atlanta radio friends and see some interesting changes in the market since our last time through, back in 2009.

AM control
AM control

AM studio
AM studio

Last time we visited, WSTR (94.1) and WQXI (790) were in the penthouse of a Buckhead office building and were owned by Lincoln Financial Media. This time out, the stations had moved to the Perimeter, in an office park overlooking the I-285/I-75 interchange and the construction site of the new Braves stadium. The stations also had a new owner, Entercom – and their new digs were actually the old studios of WKHX (101.5) and WYAY (106.7), dating back to the days when those were ABC-owned stations and later Citadel before being merged into Cumulus and moved in with the rest of Cumulus’ Atlanta signals.

Rack room
Rack room

Mic wrap!
Mic wrap!

These days, there’s a lot of studio here at 210 Interstate North Parkway for what Entercom’s doing with it. Shortly before our visit, Entercom pulled the plug on the sports format at WQXI, turning that AM signal into a temporary simulcast of top-40 “Star 94” (and inadvertently returning WQXI to its own heritage top-40 roots in sort of a back-door way!)

There are two large suites of studios here, going back to the days when one side was WKHX and the other was WYAY. The sports-talk studio for WQXI was configured to do video as well as radio, as well as to originate the Falcons radio network back when it came from here. WSTR is in the old WKHX studio, I believe, which is nice and spacious and adjoined by several production spaces.

And check out the way Entercom handled the eternal challenge of putting station branding on a Shure SM-7 mic – instead of a big flag above or on the side of the shockmount, they took the mics to a shop that does vinyl wraps for station vehicles, where they carefully matched the dimensions of the mic’s body with a custom wrap with the station logo.

WSTR studio
WSTR studio

WSTR studio
WSTR studio

Back in the heart of Atlanta, the Biltmore Hotel on Peachtree Street has a neat radio tie, too – those two towers on the roof that say “BILTMORE” on them were the original supports for the longwire antenna of Atlanta’s WSB back in the day. (We’ll see in a moment where they ended up…)

With the Braves poised to leave their current home at Turner Field after the 2016 season, we weren’t going to leave town without taking in a game, even on a brutally humid night with rain threatening. This is still a relatively new ballpark, just two decades old, and the amenities here include a nice enclosed concourse studio from which flagship station WCNN (680) originates its pregame show. Will they still be the flagship by the time the Braves move north to Cobb County in 2017? We’ll be back for a game no matter what.

Where WSB began
Where WSB began

WCNN at the ballpark
WCNN at the ballpark

One more tour completed our escape from convention-land: we’d seen Georgia Public Broadcasting’s 14th Street headquarters from the outside on previous Atlanta visits, but this time around we got to go inside to see the statewide network’s radio and TV facilities.

Turner from the GPB roof
Turner from the GPB roof

GPB lobby
GPB lobby

The dish farm on the roof of GPB’s parking garage gives a great overlook of the Turner Broadcasting campus on Techwood Drive just to the south, not to mention downtown Atlanta beyond.

Inside, some of the lighted panels in the lobby advertise the new partnership that gave GPB Radio an Atlanta outlet for the first time. Somewhat controversially, GPB struck a deal with Atlanta State University to take over the daytime hours on WRAS (88.5), displacing student and community programming to an HD2 and stream.

Radio rack room
Radio rack room

GPB radio studios
GPB radio studios

GPB’s radio facilities are on one side of the first floor of the building. There’s a spacious rack room from which GPB sends network programming out to its local studios and transmitters around the state, and a studio cluster down the other end of an L-shaped corridor.

GPB radio studio
GPB radio studio

GPB talk studio
GPB talk studio

A pledge drive was underway in one half of a pair of mirror-image studios this October day; the next studio over belongs to “On Second Thought,” the network’s 9 AM daily talk show hosted by Celeste Headlee.

Performance studio
Performance studio

Control room
Control room

There’s a performance studio/control room combination here, too, along the radio hallway.

Upstairs, there’s a spacious newsroom where GPB’s radio, TV and online crew does its work. Atlanta’s lucky to have two vibrant public media newsrooms; while GPB covers the whole state, across town there’s an excellent local newsroom at WABE (90.1), the established public station owned by the city school district.

GPB newsroom
GPB newsroom

GPB master control
GPB master control

GPB’s TV network is headquartered here, too: we get a glimpse through the glass at the TV master control that feeds transmitters statewide (including WGTV channel 8, the Athens-licensed signal that serves Atlanta from the top of Stone Mountain), and a walk past the complex of TV studios that are down in the basement.

A GPB TV studio
A GPB TV studio

GPB's big TV studio
GPB’s big TV studio
WSB
WSB
WSB's ATU
WSB’s ATU

There’s another big TV studio at ground level, too; GPB rents out this space for commercial productions, including tapings of “Divorce Court,” which apparently make the lobby an interesting place to be. (GPB also rents out some office space here to Fox News Channel, which thus ends up with an Atlanta bureau just down the street from CNN headquarters.)

The last night of the Radio Show brings a neat vendor party: our friends at the Telos Alliance partnered up with WSB (750) to host an event out at WSB’s transmitter site, and even though we’d been there before, we couldn’t resist an opportunity to go back out to this unusual site that’s been surrounded by a shopping mall. (The mall used to be known as “Northlake Tower Festival,” but it’s now just “Northlake Festival,” even though the tower is still right there in the middle of the parking lot.)

WSB tower base
WSB tower base

WSB's transmitters
WSB’s transmitters

Not much has changed here since our last visit a decade ago, but it’s still very much worth the visit just to see how spotlessly maintained a transmitter building can be.

And with that, we’re off from Atlanta on the rainy trek home…

Thanks to WSTR’s Scott Trask, GPB’s Sean Powers and WSB’s Charles Kinney 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 Atlanta IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: Washington, DC

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Tags: GPBWGTVWQXIWRASWSBWSTR
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Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

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

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