WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my entire life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in a field on Burlington’s north side:
Amazingly, WBAG is still using that same original tower, manufactured by the Wincharger company (which continues to do what it did in the first place: make windmills). Here’s one of Wincharger’s ads from back when AM radio ruled the airwaves, and the company answered growing demand:
As it happens, I document broadcast towers and antennas (which on AM are the same), for two reasons. One is that I love broadcast engineering. The other is that I know many or most of these old towers will disappear in the next decade or two.* For both reasons, I shot WBAG’s tower in 2015 and again a few days ago. It looked rusty as hell the first time, and it looks even more rusty now. Kind of like me.
But the station itself is quite the opposite. Live jocks host shows and spin records; there are nine local talk shows, and they have an abundance of local advertisers. While sitting here, I’ve heard ads for Franks Jewelry, Burlington Alamance Association of Realtors, Little Donny Walker’s Car Wash, Sam’s Factory Outlet, Suretop Roofing, Always Best Care Senior Services, and Fisher Wealth Management (which also has its own talk show on the station). These things are rare in local radio today. Most stations have long since been bought out by giants (now bankrupt or headed there), and run canned content from elsewhere.
WBAG’s main format is oldies, with a focus on Carolina Beach Music. I grooved on this genre as a student at Guilford College from ’65 to ’69. Being of a geeky bent, I listened a lot to FM radio, which was still struggling then. My fave tunings were to jazz and blues from WAAA-FM on 107.5 from Winston Salem, and top 40 from WBAG-FM on 93.9. Both of those FM licenses were bought out when FM got in the 70s and 80s. (The 93.9 license is now WNCB in Cary.) And, while WAAA went through many call letter and facility changes (it’s now WTOB, the abandoned callsign of a former top 40 station in town), WBAG remained itself continuously, eventually adding a small FM signal on 105.9 that covers Burlington, Graham, and Alamance County well enough. Here are its day/night AM and FM coverage areas:
Unlike most radio stations, WBAG doesn’t stream online. Instead, it lives in the natural world, where we still have distance, and the inverse square law applies, meaning the signals only go so far. That’s a charm of local radio.
Good to know we still have an exemplar of it.
*For example, WDNC’s transmitter site, which I operated on weekends when I lived in Graham, back in 1974. It’s all suburb now, while the station broadcasts at fractions of its old wattages on a tower it shares with another station in town.
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