WJIV

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WJIV (Victory 102) is a Christian radio station licensed to Cherry Valley, New York and serves a wide area including the Capital District, the Mohawk Valley, Oneonta, and Utica/Rome. The station broadcasts on 101.9 MHz with 11.5 kW ERP from a tower site located about 5 km (3 mi) east of Cherry Valley village. When its antenna HAAT of 312 m is taken into account, WJIV's coverage is equivalent to a full 50 kW/150 m Class B FM facility.

The format of the station is varied and includes Christian talk and ministry programs, along with southern gospel music, which is popular in the "mini-Bible Belt" which encompasses much of its coverage area.

[edit] History

An August 2005 photo of WJIV's studio and tower. Derelict weather instruments atop the roof are a reminder of the daily "Weather Roundup" reports that aired on the Rural Radio Network.

WJIV first signed on June 6, 1948 as WVCV, an affiliate of the Rural Radio Network, a service that provided farming news and rural entertainment to areas that generally lacked this type of specialized programming. The location of Cherry Valley was chosen just as much to provide additional dual service to two fringe cities (Utica & Albany) as it was for its rural target, a pattern also seen in the network's stations in Wethersfield (Buffalo & Rochester), Bristol Center (Rochester), Turin (Utica & Watertown), DeRuyter (Syracuse), and Ithaca. The engineers who planned the network selected the specific transmitter location for its relatively high elevation of 672 m (2205 ft) AMSL, which provides line-of-sight coverage into much of the Mohawk Valley. Initially, the station operated with a General Electric 250 W transmitter and four-section RCA FM Pylon antenna, providing an effective radiated power of 1.4 kW. In 1951, the ERP was increased to 5.4 kW by adding a 1 kW amplifier to the existing equipment. Most of the network programming originated at a central studio in downtown Ithaca, and was relayed to Cherry Valley by off-air pickup from the DeRuyter affiliate. A call sign change to WRRC was made in 1953 to reinforce the station's "Rural Radio" identity. The Rural Radio Network survived until 1960, dropping most of the farm related programming in favor of an over-the-air simulcast of WQXR-FM New York, along with live weather reports from each of the stations in the network every hour.

On February 1, 1960, the network was purchased by the Ivy Broadcasting Company, a corporation headed by Ellis "Woody" Erdman, who also owned WTKO(AM) in Ithaca. The group of FM stations was renamed the "Ivy Broadcasting Network", and all stations received similar new call signs with WVCV taking the WJIV calls. Ivy filed in August 1961 to increase the effective radiated power of WJIV from 5.4 kW to 102.6 kW by installing a new 15 kW transmitter and eight-bay antenna, but this application was dismissed by the FCC in 1963, because the requested power would exceed the recently revised Class B FM limit and possibly interfere with WPIX-FM in New York City, also operating on 101.9 MHz.

In April 1966, Ivy sold WJIV and the other four FM stations to Chenango and Unadilla Communications, a small upstate New York telephone company also known as C&U Telephone. However, in early 1968, C&U was acquired by Continental Telephone, a larger corporation. At that time, FCC regulations prohibited control of broadcast licenses by national phone companies of Continental's size, so the new parent was forced to divest the stations. This provided televangelist Pat Robertson the opportunity to acquire the five-station network, then valued at $600,000, as a tax-deductible gift.^[1] Mr. Robertson was already operating Channel 27 WYAH-TV and FM station WXRI in Virginia Beach, VA, and he incorporated the five upstate New York stations into his fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network on January 1, 1969. Christian programming for CBN Northeast, as the New York station group was then called, originated from the transmitter site of the Ithaca station, WEIV. During CBN's period of ownership, WJIV underwent several equipment upgrades, including installation of a new RCA stereo transmitter and circularly-polarized antenna, which increased the ERP to 7.1 kW. The CBN Northeast network operated through the 1980's, until the stations were sold individually to separate owners, thus breaking up one of the first FM radio networks in the country.

Floyd Dykeman, who had ties to the local end of WJIV, purchased the station from CBN on March 30, 1981, and kept the religious format while adding the "Jesus Is Victory" tagline built around the calls. Using some RCA audio equipment salvaged from the network's former Ithaca headquarters, new local studios were built at the transmitter site above Cherry Valley, which became known as 'Victory Mountain'. Popular programs included "Share Time", a daily call-in show. Dykeman increased the station's power to its current level in 1984, then sold the station to Detroit-based religious broadcaster Midwest Broadcasting in 2000. Following the sale the current Victory 102 name came into use.

1. ^ "The Autobiography of Pat Robertson: Shout It from the Housetops!", page 125. Bridge-Logos Publishers, 1987.

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