Site of the Week 2/17/2023: Elmira, NY and Sayre, PA

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

Our late-summer adventures with our tower buddy Mike Fitzpatrick of NECRAT.us often take us in a few different directions, and 2022’s was no exception: before heading west toward Canada, we had a busy day going south and east into the Twin Tiers of New York and Pennsylvania.

Up on the hill to the east of Elmira, the Crane Road site that used to be used by WLVY (94.3) and WOKN (99.5) now has a different tenant, Seven Mountains’ country “Bigfoot” WCBF (96.1), and we get a view up there from the parking lot at lunch.

Just down the road, Mike needed a shot of Elmira College’s WECW (107.7), so we took a spin past its little two-bay mounted on the same building that houses its studios, then moved south of the Chemung River to get a closer look at a venerable AM site. Right by the gate to the Milton Street water treatment plant, a dirt road leads along the fence into the site of what was always WENY (1230). Back in 1940, the Elmira Star-Gazette broke away from its partnership with Cornell University, allowing Ithaca’s WESG (then on 850) to become WHCU while the newspaper started its own AM signal in Elmira, right here off Milton Street.

This tower lost its top sections in a windstorm a while back – and just a few months after these pictures, Seven Mountains changed the calls here to WMAJ, parking that State College callsign to better match the “Magic” hot AC format now on 1230, feeding translators on 106.9 in Elmira and 106.7 in Corning.

Where to next? We keep going south so Mike can see the big FM tower on Comfort Hill (which we saw inside on an earlier Elmira jaunt.)

A few things have changed since our last time up here, primarily at the very top of the tower. That two-bay signal on 94.3? It was top-40 WLVY – but now it’s Family Life’s WCIH, operating noncommercially. Below that, three bays without radomes are WENI-FM (92.7, the old WENY-FM), with Tower Broadcasting’s WOKN (99.5) below that. Then there’s one bay of W205CS (88.9, a Pensacola Christian WPCS translator) and a defunct four-bay that used to be 96.1 until it moved. And below that, there’s a one-bay antenna for translator W275DD (102.9 with “Bigfoot Legends” from WENI 1450 in Corning) and a more easily-seen one-bay antenna for two more translators, Tower’s W230BB (93.9, parallel to WLVY 1600) and W293CZ (106.5, fed by WELM 1410), both now carrying the “94 Rock” that used to be on 94.3.

The rest of our afternoon was spent in the good company of Dave Radigan, whose Radigan Broadcasting group now controls pretty much the whole commercial dial between Elmira and Binghamton.

We got a quick update at his WATS (960 Sayre PA), where we had visited a few years ago – but now there’s a new equipment rack in the middle of the building, the Harris MW5 transmitter is singing along nicely, and our friend Mark Humphrey has crafted (and carefully signed!) a new ATU that hangs just inside the building on the opposite side of the wall from the tower base.

From the WATS site right on the state line, we head back into New York and up the hill to sister station WAVR (102.1 Waverly NY), where there are more updates to be seen. There’s a new Nautel VS transmitter replacing the old main rig for the FM – and right underneath, a new Radigan translator.

W299CM (107.7) moved up here from Athens, PA, rebroadcasting a top-40 format from Radigan’s WTXW (1550) down the road in Towanda, PA. It calls itself “Valley 107.7,” complete with a snazzy purple color scheme featured on a Dodge Charger parked outside the studio in Sayre.

We’ll get there, but first we get a nice peek at another Radigan signal we hadn’t seen yet.

Before Dave bought WAVR and WATS and the Towanda stations, he served Waverly and Sayre with a translator of his original signal, WEBO (1330 Owego) – and that translator, W286CS (105.1), still relays WEBO’s full-service format from the top of a water tank on “Agony Hill” northeast of Waverly, just a couple of miles south of the WAVR/WATS site at the top of Ranch Road.

(You can tell that Mark Humphrey designed these translators, since they feature the Scala CA-2-CP antenna that’s become something of his trademark.)

We had been in the Radigan studios not long before, and we need to get back – there’s new signage coming, an additional studio to break away with more local programming on his new acquisitions, WTTC and WTXW from Towanda, and perhaps even the eventual end of the long-running construction on Keystone Avenue outside.

There’s already new paint in the storefront studio at the front of the building, used mainly for the WAVR morning show, plus new logos on display for all of Dave’s stations.

From here, our final stop of the day takes us as far south as we’re going to get on this trip, down to see the site of Dave’s AM/FM combo in Towanda. Follow Old Plank Road westward and uphill from downtown Towanda along the Susquehanna River, and the little building that houses WTTC-FM (95.3) and WTXW (1550) is easy to spot on the north side of the road.

Inside, it’s all Armstrong here: a rock-solid X1000 for the AM signal (the old WTTC AM, which now just feeds the “Valley” format north to the Waverly translator) and an exciter in one rack perpendicular to the main transmitter for WTTC-FM, playing classic rock as “95.3 the Bridge.”

Out back, the three-bay FM sits atop the AM tower, and there’s a neat historical twist here: WTTC-FM actually came first, having signed on the last day of 1959 at 92.7 (it moved to 95.3 in 1964, making way for WENY-FM to use 92.7 in Elmira), with the AM following nine months later in 1960.

Did we plan to see more? Of course we did – but even with a long August evening, we had to save more Pennsylvania sites for a later trip as we headed back north to Rochester to get ready for more excitement in the next phase of the trip.

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

Next week: Buffalo updates