Channel "5" during Boston's great OTA TV outage of 2012

[Laurence Glavin]

>----- Original Message -----
>From: Scott Fybush
>Sent: 04/10/12 04:26 PM
>To: boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org
>Subject: Re: Channel "5" during Boston's great OTA TV outage of 2012

 >On 4/10/2012 4:22 PM, A. Joseph Ross wrote: > On 4/10/2012 11:01 AM, Scott Fybush wrote: > >> WCVB has an auxiliary antenna side-mounted on the Needham tower, and >> it's operating from there at low power. > > I thought WBZ-TV had a smaller tower next to the big one, which would > allow them to transmit, albeit with low range, if anything happened to > the big tower. When I read about it, I surmised that it was a response > to the problems they had after the fall of the large Soldiers Field Road > tower in 1953. > >That smaller tower was an auxiliary analog channel 4 facility. It was >never retrofitted for DTV use. >It will be interesting to see how quickly CBS moves now to establish >some sort of auxiliary DTV transmitting capability for WBZ and WSBK. >Educated speculation is that they might look to put it over at the >candelabra, where they're still renting the old WSBK analog transmitter >room. >s 



 Yesterday (Tuesday 04/10) I learned something new courtesy of Scott: that the legendary, long-standing WBZ-TV
 Tower at 350 Cedar Street, Needham, was no longer OWNED by WBZ/CBS. I had never heard about Richland Towers
 nor can I remember ever reading about the sale of the tower and land. I just visited Richland Tower's website, and
 evidently they're a big playah in this industry, although probably not close to our friends at American Tower. Now it
 seems WBZ/CBS may have to site new auxiliary facilites elsewhere like the Candelabra a la Sunbeam TV, or they could
 regard this incident as a rare one-off event that only affects two per cent of the potential audience. Also, I wonder: who
 booted WCRB-102.5 off the 350 Cedar Street Tower when the extra height was added...WBZ/CBS or Richland?