• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Tuesday, May 20, 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 2/10/2023: Bath and Corning, NY

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
February 10, 2023
in Free Content, New York, Tower Site of the Week
0

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

One of the things we look forward to every year is a visit from our colleague Mike Fitzpatrick, proprietor of the most awesome NECRAT.us site, which is even more jam-packed with tower pictures than we are.

WCIN 88.3
WCIN 88.3
WCIN 88.3
WCIN 88.3
WVIN 98.3
WVIN 98.3

Over the years, we’ve made it a point to try to visit pretty much every site within a few hours of our home base in western New York, and we cleaned up a bunch of missing pieces when Mike visited in the fall of 2022, including some sites very close to home that we hadn’t seen before.

We started our first day on the road with a very new site indeed: Family Life Ministries had just flipped the switch on its new signal in Bath, New York. Bath is Family Life’s home base, but its original flagship WCIK (103.1) moved north a few years ago to nearby Avoca, leaving a little coverage hole that Family Life filled in in 2022 by signing on WCIN (88.3), up on a hill just north of Bath at a site that’s also home to two translators. W239BK (95.7), just below WCIN’s new Shively antenna, is part of the Seven Mountains Elmira/Corning cluster, relaying “The Met” (WMTT 94.7), while W293CE (106.5) on the other side of the tower had been a Family Life translator but is headed to Tower Broadcasting, which owns Bath’s commercial stations.

WVIN (98.3) is up in the hills west of Bath, and its tower now also carries the antenna for translator W262CX (100.3), which rebroadcasts sister AM station WABH (1380).

WVIN transmitter building
WVIN transmitter building
Old WCBA building
Old WCBA building

It’s just a short drive on I-86 into Corning, where we start with a few Things That Aren’t There Anymore. Just southeast of downtown Corning, a drive up Davis Road takes us to what had long been the studio and transmitter site of WCBA (1350), one of Corning’s original two AM signals. After many years of being on and off the air and mostly simulcasting other stations, WCBA surrendered its license in 2022, but the Davis Road site isn’t gone: for the last few years, it’s also been the diplex home of Corning’s other heritage AM station, WENI (1450, ex-WCLI), which remains on the air from this site originating Seven Mountains’ “Bigfoot Country Legends” format.

WENI 1450
WENI 1450
Ex-WCEB 91.9
Ex-WCEB 91.9
Ex-WCEB 91.9
Ex-WCEB 91.9

Corning lost another signal in 2022, when Corning Community College surrendered the license for WCEB (91.9), an old class D facility that had been off the air for the last few years. The WCEB antenna was still sitting atop one of the college buildings when we drove up the hills south of Corning to have a look.

Higman translators
Higman translators
WPHD and WCIG
WPHD, WCIG and 103.3/106.7
Higman FM tower
97.7/98.7 and 4 translators

We’d been up Higman Hill, the big TV/FM site just southwest of Corning, fairly recently – but Mike hadn’t, and so we happily Jeeped our way up the rutted road to that fascinating site to see what’s new.

The tall tower on Higman, as we noted last year, carries only TV (Elmira/Corning’s ABC/CBS, Fox, PBS and My outlets) and one public radio translator (WSKG’s classical signal on 90.7), while most of the FM here comes off the older, shorter tower next to it.

97.7 and 98.7
97.7 and 98.7
The 4-station antenna
The 4-station antenna
W228DN 93.5
W228DN 93.5

Mike is a master at identifying every single antenna on a tower, so we can say a little more about what’s what on this stick, starting with the two-bay antenna at the top that carries full-power 97.7 (now Family Life’s WCIG) and 98.7 (Seven Mountains’ classic hits “Cool” WPHD), seen in the middle photo above in the container at the base of the tower. At the top of the left rack are two translators combined into an antenna near the base of the tower: Seven Mountains’ W277DG (103.3) repeats “Bigfoot Legends” from WENI (1450), while W294BU (106.7) carries “Magic” from what was then WENY (1230 Elmira, now WMAJ).

There’s a two-bay below that that has four signals all combined into it from a single rack in the container (at the right side of the left photo above): Family Worship Center’s W208BC (89.5, fed by satellite from WJFM in Baton Rouge, Louisiana); Seven Mountains’ W236AK (95.1, carrying “The Met” from WMTT 94.7) and W281BA (104.1, carrying rock “Wingz” from WCBF 96.1-HD4) and religious WLRG-LP (107.5).

The other side of that rack has still more translators: Tower’s W244EC (96.7, relaying what was then WEHH 1600) and W273AC (102.5, relaying country WOKN 99.5) are combined into one antenna lower down on the tower, below the antenna of W228DN (93.5, also relaying “Wingz”). At the top of the rack is Seven Mountain’s W300DH (107.9, relaying “Jamz” from WCBF 96.1-HD2), feeding an antenna near the bottom of the tower.

Higman translators
103.3/106.7 and 107.9
WNKI 106.1
WNKI 106.1
W267CJ
W267CJ
WNKI's building
WNKI’s building

Back down in Corning, we pass through the historic downtown and head over to the east side of town, where one of the oldest tower sites in the market sits up at the very top of Denmark Hill, overlooking Corning from the northeast.

This site hit the air in 1947 as WKNP (95.1), owned by the Corning Leader, but soon took the WCLI-FM calls and moved to 106.1 as it added WCLI (1450) from this same tower. As we noted earlier, the AM has long since moved over to Davis Road and the old WCBA site, while 106.1 continues to boom out from Denmark Hill as Seven Mountains’ WNKI (Wink 106), the only class B signal in the Elmira-Corning market, and it shares this tower with one more Seven Mountains translator, W267CJ (101.3), which also relays “The Met.”

Where to next? After a few Elmira updates, it’s off to a nifty small market that straddles the New York/Pennsylvania border, where we’ll show you Dave Radigan’s stations in next week’s installment.

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 Southern Tier IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: Elmira and on to Waverly and Towanda

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: WCBAWCEBWCIDWCIGWENIWNKIWPHDWVIN
Previous Post

NorthEast Radio Watch 2/6/2023: More Moves in NYC

Next Post

NorthEast Radio Watch 2/13/2023: Longtime Valley Voice Silenced

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

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

Related Posts

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/19/2025: WRGB’s Bishop Retires
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/19/2025: WRGB’s Bishop Retires

In this week’s issue… WRGB's Bishop to retire - CT "tower" coming down - Remembering Robin Marshall

by Scott Fybush
May 19, 2025
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
Next Post
NorthEast Radio Watch 2/13/2023: Longtime Valley Voice Silenced

NorthEast Radio Watch 2/13/2023: Longtime Valley Voice Silenced

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.