When I was a kid, I used to ask my dad why "we" (WBAP-TV) didn't have a cool broadcast tower with our name on it like WFAA did. Dad said, "We were here first, so we don't need to remind folks that we're around." LOL
The WFAA tower at Broadcast Center has been in scontinuous use since it was built in the late 1950s. In 2017 it is still used as a "STL" (studio-transmitter link).
From the excellent Fybush blog: (
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"'Tower Site' Does Dallas, part I
It's the nation's fifth-largest radio market.
It's TV market number seven.
It's the place where Gordon McLendon achieved top-40 immortality, the spot where those PAMS and JAM and TM Century jingle singers did all those jock shouts.
It's where TV news came of age 39 years ago this month.
It's the town where Radio Disney and a dozen other satellite formats originate, to be sent to a station near you - and you - and you, too.
It's got the biggest AM arrays, some of the tallest FM towers, and the most FM radio signals per capita of any major market.
Yes, my friends, we're talking about the Big D, and we do mean Dallas - and Fort Worth, too - and for the next few weeks, it'll be our focus here on Tower Site of the Week as we recap a whirlwind couple of days in the Big D in mid-October.
. . .
we headed into downtown Dallas to meet up with our tour guide for the rest of the trip, Wally Wawro of WFAA-TV (Channel 8). Wally's a fellow member of the National Radio Club; in fact, he's one of the co-hosts of next year's NRC convention back here in Dallas.
And what a tour guide! We began with an exhaustive look at the WFAA studios, seen above from the parking garage at the south end of the big Belo complex that stretches along Young Street at the south end of downtown.
Just to the left of the studio-transmitter link tower, you can see Belo corporate headquarters; at the left side of the picture is the flagship Dallas Morning News, and that's the Channel 8 studio building at center. Off to the left of the frame is another building that houses TXCN, "Texas Cable News," another Belo venture. And while it's not shown here, the WFAA lobby features an extensive historical display about the first TV station in Dallas/Fort Worth (yes, WFAA!)"
NOTE: NO, the first TV station in the area is NOT WFAA -- It's WBAP! WBAP-TV signed on the air for the first time on 29 Sep 1948. WFAA signed on 17 Sep 1949. See: (
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WFAA-TV started as KBTV Channel 8 in 1949, but was sold to the A. H. Belo Corporation in 1950 Belo changed its call letters to WFAA to match the Belo-owned radio station WFAA-AM.
From Wikipedia: (
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"WFAA, virtual channel and VHF digital channel 8, is an ABC-affiliated television station serving the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex that is licensed to Dallas, Texas, United States. The station is owned by the Tegna Media subsidiary of Tegna, Inc. and maintains offices and secondary studio facilities located at the WFAA Communications Center Studios on 606 Young Street in downtown Dallas (next to the offices of its former sister newspaper under the ownership of former parent company Belo, The Dallas Morning News), and operates a primary studio facility, which is used for the production of WFAA's newscasts and also houses certain other business operations handled by the station, located in the Victory Park neighborhood, near Olive and Houston Streets (next to the American Airlines Center) in central Dallas); the station maintains transmitter facilities located south of Belt Line Road in Cedar Hill.
. . .
Early history
The initial application for the television station was filed on October 23, 1944, when local businessman Karl Hoblitzelle, owner of movie theater chain Interstate Circuit Theatres, applied with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to obtain a construction permit and license to operate a television station on VHF channel 8; it was the first such license application for a television station in the Southern United States. Hoblitzelle planned to operate the station out of the Republic Bank building in downtown Dallas, and even conducted a closed-circuit television broadcast of the opening of one of his properties, the Wilshire Theatre. Texas oil magnate Tom Potter filed a separate application for the Channel 8 license and was ultimately awarded the permit over Hoblitzelle.
The station first signed on the air at 8:00 p.m. on September 17, 1949 as KBTV, with a fifteen-minute ceremony inaugurating the launch of Channel 8 as its first broadcast; KBTV broadcast for one hour that evening, with the remainder of its initial schedule consisting of its first locally produced program, the variety series Dallas in Wonderland. . . . It was the third television station to sign on in Texas (behind WBAP-TV (channel 5, now KXAS-TV) in nearby Fort Worth, which signed on almost one year earlier on September 29, 1948; and KLEE-TV (now KPRC-TV) in Houston, which debuted in February 1949), the second station in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and the first to be licensed to Dallas. The station originally operated from studio facilities located at Harry Hines Boulevard and Wolf Street, north of downtown Dallas.
. . . KBTV, NBC affiliate WBAP-TV and CBS affiliate KRLD-TV (channel 4, now Fox owned-and-operated station KDFW) – the latter of which was also licensed to Dallas and signed on three months later on December 3 – would be the only television stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to sign on for the next six years as the FCC had instituted a freeze on new applications for television station licenses in November 1948, a moratorium that would last for four years.
Belo ownership and ABC affiliation[edit]
The WFAA Telecruiser in use during its affiliation with DuMont.
Lacy-Potter Television Broadcasting lost a net revenue of $128,020 during its four-month stewardship of KBTV, leading Tom Potter to make the decision to put the station up for sale. The A.H. Belo Corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, had attempted to launch a new television station in Dallas two years earlier, when it applied for a construction permit to build transmitter and broadcasting facilities for a proposed station that would have transmitted on VHF channel 12. The FCC rejected Belo's application and, following the issuance of the Sixth Report and Order in 1952, eventually chose to reassign the Channel 12 allocation to Waco (after the agency assigned that same channel to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where it would be licensed to KXII, the FCC would eventually move the VHF channel 12 allocation from Waco to Abilene, which became home to present-day ABC affiliate KTXS-TV). Complicating matters, the agency's moratorium on new license applications, which the FCC instituted to sort out the backlog of prospective applicants that already filed to build such operations, left Belo with the sole recourse of acquiring a television station that was already on the air if it wanted to own one in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In January 1950, Belo purchased KBTV from Lacy-Potter for $575,000; the sale received FCC approval on March 13, 1950, with Belo formally assuming control of Channel 8 on March 17. ... Four days later on March 21, Belo changed the station's call letters to WFAA-TV to match those of its new radio partner WFAA (570 AM, now KLIF). The WFAA calls reportedly stood for "Working For All Alike," although the radio station later billed itself as the "World's Finest Air Attraction" ... WFAA is one of a relatively limited number of broadcast television stations located west of the Mississippi River whose call letters begin with a "W"; the FCC normally assigns call signs prefixed with a "K" to television and radio stations with cities of license located west of the river and broadcast call signs prefixed with a "W" to stations located east of the river. The anomaly in the case of the WFAA television and radio stations is due to the fact the policy predates the launch of the former, as Dallas was originally located east of the original "K"/"W" border distinction defined by the FCC.
In 1950, WFAA switched its primary affiliation to NBC, and also affiliated with ABC on a secondary basis. ... Although it had been apparent from the start that Dallas and Fort Worth (which Arbitron originally designated as separate media markets) were going to be collapsed into a single television market due to their close proximity, Fort Worth Star-Telegram owner Amon G. Carter – who founded WBAP-TV through his company, Carter Publications – did not care whether residents in Dallas could view that station; WFAA affiliated with NBC under a time share arrangement with WBAP-TV to expand coverage of the network's programming to areas of central and eastern Dallas County that only received rimshot coverage of the Channel 5 signal.
After ownership of Carter Publications transferred to his familial heirs after Carter suffered a fatal heart attack two years before, in early 1957, NBC threatened to strip WBAP-TV of its affiliation if it did not agree to move its transmitter eastward to reach the entire Dallas area. Belo had attempted to get an exclusive NBC affiliation first, and approached the network with an offer to make WFAA its exclusive affiliate for the entire market. The network also approached the Roosevelt family-owned Texas State Network about affiliating with independent station KFJZ-TV (channel 11, now CBS owned-and-operated station KTVT), which had earlier moved its transmitter to the antenna farm in Cedar Hill. Carter's heirs – who initially did not want to move the transmitter closer to Dallas, in their aim to continue Carter's legacy of civic boosterism for Fort Worth – eventually agreed to NBC's demands that it move WBAP-TV's transmitter facilities to Cedar Hill, installing a transmitter antenna on a 1,500-foot (460 m) candelabra tower that was already shared by WFAA and KRLD-TV, and operate it at a higher effective radiated power strong enough to adequately cover Dallas. WFAA lost its NBC affiliation on September 1, 1957, as the network had awarded WBAP-TV the exclusive affiliation for the Dallas-Fort Worth market as a byproduct of the transmitter relocation and signal boost; this left Channel 8 as an exclusive affiliate of ABC.
In 1958, WFAA became the first television station in the market to use a videotape recorder for broadcasting purposes; the station would gradually shift much of its locally produced programming from a live to a pre-recorded format, outside of newscasts, sports and special events, and eventually became one of the first television stations in the U.S. to convert its news footage to videotape in the 1970s. . . .
On April 2, 1961, the station's operations were relocated to the WFAA Communications Center Studios, a state-of-the-art broadcasting complex located at Young and Record Streets in downtown Dallas; the former studio facilities on Harry Hines Boulevard were subsequently purchased by North Texas Public Broadcasting for use as the broadcasting facilities for educational station KERA-TV (channel 13, now a PBS member station). The Communications Center complex housed three production studios, offices and sound recording studios for the WFAA radio stations as well as The Dallas Morning News' headquarters. . . .
Analog-to-digital conversion
WFAA became the first television station in the United States to broadcast their digital television signal on a VHF channel on February 27, 1998 at 2:17 p.m., when it began test broadcasts on VHF channel 9;[35] the following day on February 28, it became the nation's first television station to broadcast a local news program in high definition. When the transmission tests began, the digital feed's Channel 9 assignment was already in use by Dallas area hospitals; this would result in Baylor University Medical Center and Methodist Dallas Medical Center having to reconfigure their telemetry systems to different frequencies before WFAA began full-time digital transmissions on March 16 (when it became the country's first commercial station to begin regular digital broadcasts on the VHF band) as the station's assigned digital channel corresponded to a portion of the broadcast spectrum utilized by the hospitals for their wireless medical equipment, creating RF interference issues that notably disrupted several wireless heart monitors at both facilities.
WFAA shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 8, at 12:03 p.m. on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal relocated from VHF channel 9 to channel 8.
Immediately before WFAA ceased transmission of its analog signal, the station aired a retrospective of its history that was narrated by meteorologist Pete Delkus, which was followed by a video of the sign-off that the station had aired at the conclusion of its broadcast day during the 1970s."
I (Mama Blaster) watched that program in 2009, and as I wrote up this waymark, I was able to find it on YouTube: (
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Other Analog signoffs can be found here: (
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And also from YouTube, WFAA's broadcast of the Kennedy assassination, moments after it happened (My Dad was an eyewitness, working for WBAP-TV at the time. He is running along the N side of Dealey Plaza at 21:38 on this video.) See: (
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Here is the WFAA-TV coverage of the JFK assassination, which happened 2 blocks from WFAA-TV Broadcast Center: (
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