Saranac Lake, N.Y., is a small city in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains of far Upstate New York. In recent years, it has gained attention for the acquisition of a failed radio station, silenced by its licensee, by two foreign citizens. It has also received attention for a UHF channel that’s been the subject of a coverage battle with Comcast.
That channel is today owned by Gray Television. And, it serves the Burlington, Vt.-Plattsburgh, N.Y. market. A petition Gray has just submitted to the FCC now brings the company the potential to fully complete, on par, with in-market competitor Hearst Television.
An Engineering Exhibit prepared for Gray by Chesapeake RF Consultants LLC, obtained by RBR+TVBR, confirms that it is submitting for regulatory approval an application that would give it a Construction Permit to operate WYCI-DT as a Distributed Transmission System (DTS) by adding another transmitter site to its current operation.
It’s a major move for Gray, and essentially makes the company a full player in the Burlington-Plattsburgh market. Furthermore, WYCI would enjoy an over-the-air signal as far north as Montréal, which historically has received Burlington-Plattsburgh “Big Four” TV stations on local cable TV systems.
Importantly, it puts Hearst on notice that it has a fight on its hands locally.
And, it’s a battle that is five years in the making.
WYCI, which has a PSIP of 40 and uses digital channel 34, in October 2016 was a property of Cross Hill Communications. The station’s then-owner wanted WYCI placed on Comcast’s Xfinity channel lineup across the Burlington-Plattsburgh DMA. Comcast protested, and fought a “must carry” request by filing a cable special relief petition (CSR) with the FCC. This would have allowed Xfinity to become exempt from a pending market modification of the station to Burlington-Plattsburgh.
At the time, WYCI was a RetroTV affiliate, purchased by Cross Hill in December 2013 from Donald McHone’s Channel 61 Associates LLC. It paid $225,000 for what was WNMN-TV.
Interestingly, Comcast in December 2016 abandoned its fight against Cross Hill and WYCI. Was it privy to a potential sale of the station?
On October 14, 2019, Cross Hill agreed to sell WYCI to Gray for $1.1 million. But, the deal came after Gray in May 2017 paid $29 million for the Burlington-Plattsburgh market’s CBS affiliate WCAX-3.
The 2019 sale of WYCI created a duopoly that passed muster with the FCC’s local ownership rules, and the Commission approved the deal in February 2020.
By that time, WYCI had shifted its programming by placing the Heroes & Icons multicast network on its DT1 signal. It is also a secondary MyNetwork TV station for Burlington-Plattsburgh.
THE COMING DTS BOOST
Now, WYCI is poised to employ a new antenna system to be side-mounted on an existing tower structure associated with FCC Antenna Structure Registration number 1003384.
No change to the overall structure height will result.
WYCI will continue to operate as licensed from “DTS site No. 2.”
The proposed antenna for DTS site No. 1 is an elliptically polarized directional Dielectric model TFU-16DSB-B/VP-R, with 30% vertical polarization.
The proposed antenna height above ground is 738.19 feet; the antenna HAAT is 1,735.6 feet.
With a tower site that’s a 90-minute drive to Rue Crescent in the heart of Montréal, effective radiated power of 200,000 watts would easily reach the city — let alone the entire Burlington-Plattsburgh DMA.
Mutual interference would be mitigated by “considerable terrain blockage,” Chesapeake RF Consultants notes.
For those familiar with the region, DTS site No. 1 will be built on Terry Mountain. It is where Hearst’s NBC affiliate, WPTZ-5, had its tower for some 40 years. It’s just 17 miles southwest of Plattsburgh,
When up and running, the signal will stretch as far into Vermont as Montpelier.
And, thanks to that mountainous terrain, it will enjoy coverage of the most populous areas of Montréal.
With WCAX and WYCI, Gray will compete against Hearst’s WPTZ and The CW Network affiliate in Burlington-Plattsburgh, WNNE-31.
The two stations currently use a tower atop Mt. Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont.
Hearst has owned WPTZ and WNNE since July 1998; the stations were previously owned by Heritage Media, and in the span of 12 months starting in 1997 were sold to Sinclair Broadcast Group, and then to Sunrise Television. Sunrise then engaged in an asset swap that brought WPTZ and WNNE into the Hearst family.
