The KWTV/DT Channel 9 tower was also NGS benchmark FJ0862 Okla City TV Sta KWTV Mast. The transmitter is located northeast of Oklahoma City. See: (
visit link)
"FJ0862 DESIGNATION - OKLA CITY TV STA KWTV MAST
FJ0862 PID - FJ0862
FJ0862 STATE/COUNTY- OK/OKLAHOMA
FJ0862 USGS QUAD - SPENCER (1987)
FJ0862
FJ0862 *CURRENT SURVEY CONTROL
FJ0862 _________________________________________________________________
FJ0862* NAD 83(1993)- 35 32 58.56964(N) 097 29 50.27119(W) ADJUSTED
_________________________________________________________
FJ0862
FJ0862_MARKER: 42 = RADIO/TV MAST
FJ0862
FJ0862 HISTORY - Date Condition Recov. By
FJ0862 HISTORY - 1954 FIRST OBSERVED CGS
FJ0862
FJ0862 STATION DESCRIPTION
FJ0862
FJ0862''DESCRIBED BY COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY 1954 (ITS)
FJ0862''THE STATION IS THE ANTENNA ATOP A THREE SIDED STEEL MAST,
FJ0862''ABOUT 1 MILE NORTH OF THE OKLAHOMA CITY LIMITS, AT 7301 NORTH
FJ0862''LINCOLN BLVD. THE MAST IS A SKELETON FRAMEWORK 1572 FEET HIGH,
FJ0862''PAINTED RED AND WHITE, AND IS OWNED BY THE OKLAHOMA TELEVISION
FJ0862''CORPORATION."
This benchmark tower was taken down in 2014 (our waymark photos date from a find in 2009). The benchmark is destroyed.
From the station website: This tower and transmitter has been consigned to legacy status as of 2014, with the switch to digital broadcasting: (
visit link)
"End of An Era: KWTV To Take Down Historic Broadcast Tower
Posted: Jul 28, 2014 9:49 PM CDT Updated: Oct 21, 2014 11:57 AM CDT
OKLAHOMA CITY - Many people may not know, or if they did, have since forgotten, but the broadcast tower at KWTV News 9 once held a pretty impressive world record.
When Channel 9 first signed on the air in December of 1953, it transmitted from a short temporary tower in northeast Oklahoma City.
"We were using a tower that belonged to KOMA Radio," said former KWTV General Manager, Jack DeLier.
DeLier said not for long though, as owner John Griffin had bigger plans.
"The higher the tower, the more viewers we got," DeLier said.
So up they went, and so did I, to see firsthand just how massive the tower is.
The tower stands at more than 1,572 feet tall, around 300 feet higher than the Empire State Building, making it at one time the world's tallest manmade structure. So tall In fact, Griffin decided against the call letters KOMA and instead chose KWTV, standing for “world's tallest video”.
By the fall of 1954, we reached the widest coverage of any station in the southwest with the view from the top reaching a 60-mile horizon.
"It was real big deal," DeLier said. "We had a grand dedication, Johnny Carson was the master of ceremonies, and Vera Ellen who was a film actress and dancer at that time, climbed up on the elevator to the 1,300 foot level and danced on the platform."
The tower cost $650,000 to build back then, that would be just over $3M today. And here are some other facts worth noting: 100,000 pounds of bolts were used in constructing the tower with an overall weight of one million pounds, 28,690 feet of cable was used, 770 gallons of paint is needed for just one coat and 14,400 watts of power is needed to light it up. It also has a one man electric elevator for workers to use for antenna and tower maintenance.
"It was kind of overly designed," said Jack Mills, KWTV's Director of Engineering. "They never built a structure that tall before and so they had to come up with unique measures of doing it."
And at that time, unique programming. The network didn't sign on each day until 6:30 p.m., so stations were tasked with filling the airwaves, mostly with syndicated and local programs.
"Lola Hall was the first weather girl," DeLier recalls. "We had a local live show on Saturday morning called Miss Fran from Storyland. Gaylon Stacy came on later, he had an afternoon show.
From black and white to now high definition, the tower has served us well, but now it's time for it to come down. Mills is now tasked with taking down this iconic structure.
"The process will be basically a reverse process of installation," Mills said. "They'll put a gin pole on the tower which will be a small section of tower that they can dismantle pieces and lower it down. I feel privileged to take down the tower."
And I feel privileged to be one of the last people to travel up this towering piece of broadcast and Oklahoma history before it's laid to rest.
Now, this doesn't mean News 9 is going off the air. The TV business has changed and we simply don't use the tower anymore. That's why we are having the KWTV tower taken down. We've hired a company that specializes in removing broadcast towers to come in and take it down piece by piece this fall. Once it's down, a scrap metal company will take it to be recycled.
With the change to digital from analog signals our News 9 signal moved to a different tower that is a shared tower with other stations."
A good station history can be found on Wikipedia: (
visit link)
KWTV-DT, virtual channel 9 (UHF digital channel 39), is a CBS-affiliated television station licensed to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States. It is the flagship television station of locally based Griffin Communications as part of a duopoly with MyNetworkTV affiliate KSBI (channel 52). The two stations share studio facilities located on Kelley Avenue (adjacent to the studios and main offices of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority PBS member network), and its transmitter is located near the John Kilpatrick Turnpike/Interstate 44, both on the city's northeast side.
On cable, the station is carried on channel 9 on most cable systems in the market (channel 10 on Cox Communications' Oklahoma City system).
History[edit]
John Toole Griffin, a local grocery magnate and founder of Griffin Foods, decided to apply for a broadcast license with the Federal Communications Commission after noticing while driving around Oklahoma City that many homes in the area had outdoor television antennas installed to receive WKY-TV (channel 4, now KFOR-TV), which debuted in June 1949 as the first television station in Oklahoma.
KWTV first signed on the air on December 20, 1953; it was founded by Griffin and his brother-in-law James C. Leake, co-owners of radio station KOMA (1520 AM, now KOKC). Channel 9 initially transmitted its signal from a shorter temporary tower near its Kelley Avenue studios as its permanent transmitter tower, for which the Griffins chose the KWTV callsign (standing for "World's Tallest Video") for the station over using the KOMA calls, was still under construction; when it was activated in 1954, the 1,577 feet (481 m) structure became the tallest free-standing broadcast tower in the world at the time. As of October 2014, the tower is currently being removed and sold for scrap. KWTV's first broadcast was a roll call of station employees introducing themselves and the departments they were employed with.
KWTV has been a CBS affiliate since its sign-on (having taken the affiliation from WKY-TV, which relegated the network to secondary clearances), owing to KOMA's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network; it is one of the few American television stations that has had the same callsign, ownership, primary network affiliation and over-the-air channel allocation throughout its history. Todd Storz, creator of the Top 40 radio format, purchased KOMA in 1958. Griffin and Leake bought out the partners that held minority interest in KWTV in 1963; Leake then sold his interest to Griffin in 1968, in return for Griffin's share of two other television stations, KTUL in Tulsa and KATV in Little Rock. By the 1970s, KWTV became the first station in Oklahoma City to record news footage on videotape instead of film. In the late 1970s, it also became the market's first television station to maintain a 24-hour programming schedule. John Griffin retired in 1990, and turned over control of channel 9 to his son David.
KWTV logo used from March 1997 to October 24, 2010; the "9" in the logo, which resembles that used by KUSA/Denver and WSOC-TV/Charlotte, was first used (without the box framing) in 1986.
On August 18, 1993, KWTV partnered with Cox Cable and Multimedia Cablevision to create a 24-hour local cable news channel through a condition in carriage renewal agreements between Griffin Television and the two cable providers. This channel, News Now 53, debuted locally on December 3, 1996 on Cox channel 53, featuring rebroadcasts and live simulcasts of KWTV's news programs (News Now 53 was initially available only in Oklahoma City proper, expanding to its outlying suburbs after Cox acquired Multimedia Cablevision from the Gannett Company in January 2000); a Tulsa area feed of News Now 53 launched in 2000 after Griffin purchased that market's CBS affiliate, KOTV.
On January 26, 2001, a Beechcraft Super King Air 200 transporting nine members of the Oklahoma State University basketball team (including two players and six members of the coaching staff) and KWTV sports director Bill Teegins (who was also the university's football and basketball radio announcer) crashed in a field near Strasburg, Colorado. The plane departed from Jefferson County Airport following a game against the University of Colorado Buffaloes, when the pilot became disoriented while flying through heavy snow on the way to Stillwater Regional Airport; all ten men on board were killed (two memorials have since been erected in remembrance of the tragedy: one at the crash site, and another outside of Gallagher-Iba Arena at OSU's Stillwater campus featuring a statue of a kneeling cowboy)
Also in 2001, KWTV entered into a content partnership with The Oklahoman, resulting in the merger of both the station and newspaper's websites under the "NewsOK" banner; this collaboration ended in early 2008 (the NewsOK website continues to exist as the standalone website for The Oklahoman). Ironically the Gaylord family, who ran the newspaper from 1907 to 2011 (when the paper's owner, OPUBCO Communications Group, was sold to The Anschutz Corporation), built and signed on competitor KFOR-TV in 1949, and owned that station until 1975. On October 25, 2010, KWTV became the first television station in the Oklahoma City market to carry syndicated programming and advertisements inserted during local commercial breaks (including station and network promos) in high definition.
Digital television
Digital channels
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
Channel Video Aspect PSIP Short Name Programming
9.1 1080i 16:9 News9 Main KWTV-DT programming / CBS
9.2 480i 16:9 News9 N News 9 Now
News 9 Now is a news simulcast/rebroadcast channel that previously operated as cable-only News Now 53 from December 3, 1996 to March 30, 2011. Owned by Griffin Communications in cooperation with Cox Communications, it also runs a three-hour block of E/I-compliant children's programs on Saturday afternoons.
Analog-to-digital conversion
KWTV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 9, on February 17, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television (which Congress had moved the previous month to June 12). The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 39 to VHF channel 9. Due to reception issues in parts of central Oklahoma, KWTV was granted permission by the FCC to operate a secondary signal on its former UHF digital channel 39 under special temporary authorization in October 2009, mapped to virtual channel 9.2. On March 9, 2010, the FCC issued a Report & Order, approving the station's request to move its digital signal from channel 9 to channel 39.
On April 20, 2010, KWTV filed a minor change application on its new channel 39 allotment, that was granted on June 10. Short-lived service interruptions began on July 29 to allow viewers to rescan their digital tuners to carry the UHF channel 39 signal. On August 16, 2010, the digital signal on UHF channel 39 added a virtual channel on 9.1, in addition to the 9.2 PSIP channel. KWTV terminated its digital signal on channel 9 and began to operate only on channel 39 on August 30, 2010 at 12:30 p.m."