Re: WUMB, WMWM, and You

[Scott D Fybush <fybush@world.std.com>]

> 
> <<On Tue, 30 Jan 2001 22:52:17 -0500 (EST), Scott D Fybush <fybush@world.std.com> said:
> 
> > I don't know whether the FCC even still licenses new "satellite" TV
> > operations
> 
> They did so relatively recently; when B.U. purchased WCVX and WNBU,
> they had to demonstrate specifically that it was in the public
> interest to make those stations into satellites of WABU.
> 

I had forgotten about that example -- though even that was in a 
different era where the FCC was concerned. 

It's interesting to see the different ways satellite stations can
function.  WCDC, like WPXG/WDPX, is a 24/7 relay of its parent with
no local origination.  When Elmira's channel 18 was a satellite
of Syracuse's channel 3, as WSYE/WSYR-TV and later WETM/WSTM, it
always did its own local newscasts from a studio at the transmitter
site high on Hawley Hill.  (It was sold off separately in the mid-80s
and is now its own beast, totally separate from Syracuse).  

Pegasus Broadcasting split up a parent/satellite combination in
Scranton/Wilkes-Barre a few years ago.  WOLF-TV on channel 38 in
Scranton was the high-powered Fox affiliate, with satellites 
WWLF 56 in Hazleton (40 miles south) and WILF 53 in Williamsport
(60 miles west and across the mountains).   When they got a major
power increase and site change for WWLF, moving it north to the
ridge near Wilkes-Barre where the market's other stations were, they
moved the WOLF-TV calls there and made channel 56 the parent.  Channel
38 was split off and became WB affiliate WSWB, while WILF began relaying
WOLF-TV 56.  (To make matters weirder, WOLF-TV gets its 10PM news
from WNEP-TV 16, the ABC affiliate).

As I've been doing research for the big trip Garrett and I will
be taking later this summer, I've come across some others: KFXA in
Cedar Rapids IA and KFXB in Dubuque are parent/satellite -- but while
KFXA does no local news (it's a Fox in a market that already has 3
local newscasts), KFXB does local news at 5 and 10 (before it was 
a satellite, it was a stand-alone ABC affiliate and is the only
station in Dubuque).

South Dakota and Nebraska have tons of satellite stations, with parents
in places like Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Lincoln, and satellites in
isolated farm towns that do news cut-ins for part of the newscast but
carry most of the parent station's show.  (Garrett will understand when
I say that I'm counting on him to tape some of these :-)

And here's one that I've just found out about: WICA, Channel 15 in
Ashtabula, Ohio, has been defunct for several decades.  But when it
was alive (1950s-60s), it was a satellite of WICU, Channel 12 over in
Erie, PA.  I should have guessed!

-s