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Site of the Week 8/12/2022: Bob Bittner’s WJTO, Bath

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
August 12, 2022
in Free Content, Maine, Tower Site of the Week
2

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

After more than 20 years of doing this column, and thus over 1000 (!) Tower Site of the Week installments, we sometimes end up revisiting sites we’ve seen in the past.

WJTO building
WJTO building

Sometimes it’s to update a site where a lot has changed – and sometimes, it’s just to visit an old friend. In the fall of 2021, our stop along the coast in Bath, Maine was decidedly the latter. We’ve been proud to call Bob Bittner a friend for decades now, going back to his purchase of AM 740 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he just marked the 30th anniversary of his relaunch as WJIB on August 4, 1992.

Welcome to WJTO, et al
Welcome to WJTO, et al
Another Bob collection
Another Bob collection

We spent a lot of time in the 1990s in Bob’s Cambridge studio, swapping radio tales (and co-hosting his old “Let’s Talk About Radio” show) and watching him slowly expand his radio empire to include stations in Worcester and Manchester, New Hampshire. Those stations are gone now, but in 1997 Bob acquired WJTO in Bath, making this lovely coastal spot his new home base. (We showed it to you here in the summer of 2005.)

Music library
Music library
Looking into the studio
Looking into the studio

As anyone who’s ever listened to any of Bob’s stations knows, these are some of the most uniquely programmed outlets anywhere in the country, playing an immense variety of soft AC, standards and whatever else strikes Bob’s fancy, run entirely by Bob from right here in this building that once housed not only WJTO but its sister FM station, WKRH (105.9, now WBCI under different ownership.)

WJTO studio
WJTO studio
WJTO studio
WJTO studio

It’s a lot of building for just one guy, but Bob has it filled with lots of interesting stuff – a tiny portion of his huge license plate collection in the lobby, along with bumper stickers and program guides going back to the early days of WJIB and WJTO; a massive record collection that fills several rooms; memorabilia from other stations Bob has owned or worked at; and two studios that mostly house the automation that runs his three-station simulcast, which includes WJTO, WJIB and WBAS on Cape Cod. (Two more Bittner stations, WLAM in Lewiston and WLVP in Portland, run similar formats from automation at their transmitter sites.)

Bob's old signs
Bob’s old signs
AM transmitter
AM transmitter
W287BB
W287BB

A small room off the record library houses Bob’s current transmitters for both WJTO’s big daytime AM signal and its newer translator, W287DD (105.3), which serves the immediate Bath area from the top of the AM tower. (Fybush Media was delighted to handle some of the engineering work for that signal and two other Bittner translators a few years back.)

WJTO's tower
WJTO’s tower
W287DD
W287DD

After hanging out with Bob for a while, we were fortunate to be able to join in one of his frequent get-togethers with fellow radio owners and veterans, so from here, we were off to a long outdoor lunch and chat before heading back down the coast toward Boston, with a promise that we won’t let another 17 years go by before another stop up here in Bath.

CALENDARS ON CLEARANCE

If you don’t have your 2023 Tower Site Calendar yet, now is the perfect time to get it. Because we have lowered the price to just $14.

The calendar has great photos of broadcast sites near and far (everywhere from Navajo Nation on the cover to Boston to Toronto to Texas, and beyond), plus a lovely “centerfold” you can keep on your wall for 2024.

It’s still shipping regularly, and you can have yours in just a couple of days!

Order your copy and you’ll see what we mean.

If you have already ordered your calendar, make sure you check out the other items in the store, too!

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

Next week: WHEB, Portsmouth NH

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Tags: WBASWJIBWJTOWLAMWLVP
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Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

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

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