The waymark coordinates are located at the brick entrance to the tower Hill property near the WFAA & KDFW transmitter buildings along Belt Line Road.
Towers started sprouting in Cedar Hill in 1955, when competitor TV Stations WFAA-TV Channel 8 and KRLD-TV Channel 4 (now KDFW-TV) formed the Hill Tower Company to buy a huge tract of raw land at the highest point in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, off of Belt Line road and the US 67 west of downtown Cedar Hill TX.
The stations teamed up to build the first candelabra broadcast tower in the industry, and are still co-located on a successor candelabra today. By 1957 WBAP-TV Channel 5 (now KXAS-DT) built their own tower on the eastern edge of the Hill Tower tract.
As always, Scott Fybush's blog does a great job untangling the history and the occupants in "'Tower site' Does Dallas, part I": (
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"And now we're off to one of the major highlights not only of this trip but of our career as tower-hunters: heading south to Cedar Hill, the small community some 20 miles southwest of Dallas that's home to one of the biggest concentrations of tall towers anywhere in America.
The history of Cedar Hill is closely bound up with the history of WFAA, and it goes something like this: WFAA signed on in 1949 as KBTV, operating from a short tower and a little studio on Harry Hines Boulevard at what was then the northern extreme of Dallas. The Morning News, which already owned WFAA radio, bought KBTV soon after its debut and changed the calls to WFAA-TV.
It was quickly followed by two more stations in the area: KRLD-TV, owned by the Dallas Times-Herald and KRLD radio, on channel 4; and Amon Carter's WBAP-TV, channel 5, 35 miles away in Fort Worth, paired with WBAP radio and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
WFAA and KRLD realized within a few years that Dallas and Fort Worth would be a single TV market, and the best spot to reach the whole area would be Cedar Hill. In 1954, they formed the Hill Tower Company, bought a huge parcel of land in the area west of US 67, and built a candelabra tower, flanked on the left by the channel 4 transmitter building and on the right by the channel 8 transmitter building. The tower, ordered as part of a turnkey deal from RCA (back when there was an RCA Broadcast!), was an Ideco-Dresser, 1439 feet to the base of the candelabra and almost 1510 feet to the top of the antennas. (This was, after all, Texas.)
WBAP-TV, meanwhile, kept transmitting from its site on Broadcast Hill, just east of downtown Fort Worth - which meant that its signal in Dallas was nowhere near as good as the new channel 4 and 8 signals. Amon Carter was well known for his dislike (and that's the kind term) for Dallas, and legend has it that he didn't much care whether people there could see channel 5. Unfortunately, the brass at NBC in New York didn't share that opinion, and legend has it that they told Carter they'd pull the affiliation if he didn't join the other stations at Cedar Hill.
So WBAP-TV and WBAP-FM (96.3) built their own building, right between the existing two and directly in front of the tower, and all three major networks (KRLD-TV was the CBS affiliate, WFAA was and has always been ABC) had signal parity in the market. WBAP and KRLD both ended up being sold away from their radio and newspaper partners, so channel 5 eventually became KXAS-TV and channel 4 KDFW-TV, but the happy Hill Tower consortium stayed in place - and what a sight it must have been, pulling in to the driveway off Belt Line Road, between the big brick entrance walls and up to the panorama of the three transmitter buildings, call signs proudly emblazoned above them, and the huge tower behind them!
Inside the WFAA-TV building, the RCA TT-11 transmitter installed in 1954 eventually gave way to a newer Harris; somewhere in here, WFAA-FM (97.9) also installed its transmitter.
Around the site, Hill Tower began leasing land to other stations to build their own towers, as the Dallas-Fort Worth dial lit up with new UHF and FM facilities. And at its own site on Belt Line Road, everything just kept chugging along - until Wednesday, January 4, 1987, when a Navy F-4 jet on approach to the nearby Dallas Naval Air Station (which has since closed) clipped several of the guy wires to the candelabra. The pilot and co-pilot ejected before the plane crashed and survived; the tower suffered severe damage, including the loss of several transmission lines, knocking the stations there off the air.
The tower was insured, of course, and the Hill Tower consortium was ready to rebuild. But the insurance companies said the old tower was unsafe above the spot where the plane hit, so while it could remain in use as an auxiliary facility (trimmed back to the thousand-foot level), the original plan to simply rebuild the candelabra and carry on was unworkable.
And so it came to pass that the KDFW and WFAA transmitter buildings became auxiliary transmitter buildings - and the KXAS building became vacant, as channel 5, never a member of the Hill Tower consortium, built its own tower nearby. Channels 4 and 8 stayed together, though."
"Tower Site" does Dallas, Part II: (
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"After the Navy jet crashed into the old WFAA/KDFW/KXAS tower here in 1989, forcing the top 500 feet of the 1500-foot tower to be removed, the old tower remained in use, with new auxiliary antennas for channels 4 and 8 installed up top and a whole batch of auxiliary FM transmitters and antennas taking up residence as well. What we're seeing in the picture at left is three auxiliary transmitters for Infinity's FMs: KRBV (100.3), KOAI (107.5) and KYNG (105.3), not necessarily in that order.
The old tower is also home to auxiliary transmitters for KKDA-FM (104.5) and KDMX (102.9).
But enough about the past; after that crash, the Hill Tower consortium of WFAA and KDFW decided to build a new, taller candelabra to the south of the old one. KXAS (Channel 5), the NBC affiliate that had been a latecomer to the original candelabra (which was the very first candelabra tower ever), decided to go its own way, leasing land at the eastern edge of the Hill Tower property for a new tower of its own. Former KXAS sister station KSCS (96.3, the old WBAP-FM) moved there as well, and was joined later on by the 97.9 that was WFAA-FM years ago, later to be known as KZEW, KKWM, KLRX, KKRW and now KBFB.
Between the new channel 5 tower and the old Hill Tower tower, three more tall towers lined up along Belt Line Road. You can see them in the image at the top of the page; the leftmost tall tower (and the most westerly) is today home to KNON (89.3), KVTT (91.7), KPXD-DT (42) and the Clear Channel auxiliary transmitters; next in line is a candelabra tower that hosts KZPS (92.5), KLNO (94.1), KLTY (94.9), WRR (101.1), KKDA-FM (104.5), KHKS (106.1), KDTN (2, a very late addition to the dial as a Denton-licensed second PBS service owned by KERA-TV/FM that debuted only in the late eighties), KTXA (21), KDFI (27), KDTX (58) and CPs for KUVN-DT (24, a move-in from Garland, where Univision's analog KUVN operates on channel 23), KDTX-DT (45) and KTAQ-DT (46, a move-in from Greenville, where KTAQ-TV is on channel 47); the candelabra to the right of that holds KEGL (97.1), KLUV (98.7), KVIL (103.7), KFWD (52), KPXD (68) and CPs for KLTY (94.9), KKDA-FM (104.5) and KFWD-DT (51); and after that comes channel 5's tower, shared with KSCS (96.3) and KBFB (97.9).
Off in the distance towards the right edge of the frame is an FM tower that's home to KRBV (100.3), KYNG (105.3) and KOAI (107.5) with a CP for KRBV (100.3), and at the far edge of the frame, looming over the old KDFW building, is the KXTX (39), KXTX-DT (40) and KXAS-DT (41) tower, itself the victim of a collapse in 1996, when a gust of wind apparently caught the gin pole being used for tower work and blew it into several guy wires, killing three employees of Doty-Moore Tower Services. (KRBV, KYNG and KOAI were also on the KXTX tower then.)
Back to KDFW and WFAA, though: they ended up at the western edge of the Cedar Hill tower cluster, on the mightily tall tower seen at left. On the candelabra up top, we find WFAA-TV at left (east), KDFW in the center (north) and KDFW-DT (35) atop WFAA-DT (9) at right (west).
. . . A few more towers wrap up our visit to Cedar Hill: south of the WFAA/KDFW tower is yet another tall stick that's home to KPLX (99.5), KDGE (102.1), KDMX (102.9) and an auxiliary for KVIL (103.7).
Heading to the next site on our agenda, we stop on the eastern edge of the Hill Tower property to get a nice group shot of the towers (yes, you can expect it to grace the 2004 Tower Site Calendar in a year's time!)"