Radio and TV stuff

This from the online edition of Northeast Radiowatch by Scott Fybush... Mostly his words:

An era has ended at the state's big country station, as Floyd Wright exits afternoon drive at WWYZ (92.5 Waterbury) after 20 years on the air there. Wendy Steele moves from middays to afternoons, and the midday shift is now being voicetracked from WGAR (99.5 Cleveland) by Kat Jackson.

An era has ended in Hartford TV, too - after 45 years of transmitting from the Avon Mountain tower of WTIC-FM (96.5), Connecticut Public TV flagship WEDH (Channel 24) has signed off for good from that site. In what may be the last full-power analog site to be built from scratch, WEDH has turned on its new facility over at Rattlesnake Mountain, where the WTIC-TV (Channel 61) tower has been extensively rebuilt for the coming of digital TV. Where's WEDH-DT? Still hung up in proceedings over its final channel election, as its tentative assignment of channel 45 conflicts with WABC-DT in New York, so for now CPTV is using 45 at WEDN-DT in Norwich (eventually to move to channel 9), while waiting for authorization to use 45 in Hartford.

And, NBC's WVIT (Channel 30) hopes to break ground in August on a new $20 million studio/office building at its present site in West Hartford, to replace the 1954-vintage building there that the station has long since outgrown. The current building will be razed and will become a parking lot for the new studios when the project is completed in late 2008.

There was a tower collapse here during the big storm there last month: the 188-foot tower of WYBC (1340 New Haven) succumbed to the storm's high winds late on the night of April 14, toppling into the swamp where it sits. (It took several days for the weather to calm down sufficiently for the tower's remains to even be found in the swamp, we're told.)

WYBC quickly returned to the air with a longwire antenna. The collapse was blamed on a guy-wire anchor that had corroded to "the thickness of a pencil," says engineer Clif Mills, and a replacement tower will soon be erected at the same site.

In Hartford, WCCC-FM (106.9) has turned on its HD2 subchannel, and it's relaying the classical "Beethoven Radio" service that's also heard on sister station WCCC (1290 West Hartford), which will now reach a much larger potential audience 24 hours a day on the big FM signal.