WNGH
WNGH, generally styled WNGH-TV, is a non-commercial educational television station licensed to Chatsworth, Georgia, in the United States. Broadcasting on virtual channel 18, it is a member station of Georgia Public Broadcasting, the statewide public television and radio service operated by the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission, and it carries programming from PBS. The station signed on January 30, 1967, as WCLP, and it kept that call sign for more than forty years before becoming WNGH-TV in 2008. It serves northwest Georgia and the Chattanooga, Tennessee, television market from a transmitter on a mountain within Fort Mountain State Park near Chatsworth. Because of the height of that transmitter site, WNGH is one of the strongest stations in the Georgia network, providing at least secondary coverage as far north as Athens, Tennessee, and as far south as the northern and northwestern suburbs of metropolitan Atlanta. It is also, in effect, a second public television signal for the Chattanooga area, where it overlaps with Tennessee's own PBS station.
Northwest Georgia and the Chattanooga Market
Chatsworth is the seat of Murray County in the mountains of northwest Georgia, near the Tennessee line. WNGH is assigned to the Chattanooga television market, and its identifications in the network's two-city convention have paired Chatsworth with Dalton, the larger carpet-manufacturing city to its west. The station's territory is defined by terrain: the ridges of the southern Appalachians that make the region scenic also block television signals, and a high transmitter was the only practical way to cover the valleys of northwest Georgia. Its mountaintop signal reaches across the state line into southeastern Tennessee and southward toward Atlanta's northern suburbs, where it serves viewers who in some places can no longer receive the network's flagship, WGTV, reliably. Within Chattanooga itself, some network program duplication occurs with WTCI, the PBS station licensed to Chattanooga, because both stations carry PBS programming into the same market from different state systems. Georgia Public Broadcasting has supplemented WNGH with translator stations near the state's borders with Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina, in areas where distance and mountain terrain leave coverage from any full-power transmitter insufficient.
Sign-On as WCLP in 1967
The station made its first broadcast on January 30, 1967, as WCLP, a National Educational Television and Georgia Educational Television network affiliate. It was one of the four educational stations the Georgia Board of Education launched across the state in the early and middle 1960s to provide in-school instruction, the initiative that grew into the Georgia Educational Television Network, which aired Board of Education-produced classes for schools and evening programming from the University of Georgia's WGTV. WCLP's arrival had a significance beyond Georgia: it was, in effect, Chattanooga's first educational television station, because Tennessee's WTCI did not begin broadcasting until 1970. For three years, the Georgia station on the mountain above Chatsworth was the only educational television service readily available in the Chattanooga area. The call letters honored Dr. Claude Lamar Purcell, who was the Georgia state superintendent of schools, following the network's practice of naming stations for state education leaders. The station signed on without the hyphenated suffix and added it later, becoming WCLP-TV on February 2, 1979.
The Fort Mountain Transmitter
WNGH transmits from atop a mountain in the west-southwestern part of Fort Mountain State Park, near Chatsworth and close to Cohutta Mountain, the location named in its historic sign-on announcements. The site is not Fort Mountain itself, but its elevation gives the station its reach: the transmitter's height above the surrounding valleys lets a UHF signal, and later a VHF one, travel across northwest Georgia and into Tennessee. The tower has become a small broadcast center for the region's public media. In May 2008, the network's new Chatsworth radio station, WNGH-FM, moved its transmission to the same tower as the television station. WNGH-FM operates with only 420 watts, but because its transmitter sits 541.8 meters, about 1,778 feet, above average terrain at the shared site, it provides city-grade coverage to much of far northern Georgia, including Dalton, and secondary coverage to much of the Chattanooga area. The television station's own coordinates are approximately 34 degrees 45 minutes north latitude and 84 degrees 42 minutes west longitude.
Consolidation Into the Statewide Network
Like its sister stations, WCLP passed from the Board of Education's educational network into the modern unified service in the early 1980s. Governor George Busbee proposed in November 1980 that the University of Georgia's WGTV be consolidated with the state's transmitter network under a new Georgia Public Telecommunications Council; the measure stalled in the House of Representatives, and the governor revived it by executive order after the session ended. On January 1, 1982, the new council took operational control of WGTV, the combined service rebranded as Georgia Public Television, and by June 1982 WGTV was fully incorporated, with the university's role reduced to program supplier. The service later took the name Georgia Public Broadcasting, under which the Chatsworth station operates today, and licenses for the network are held by the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission. Through all of these reorganizations the station at Chatsworth kept its original WCLP call letters, its channel 18 position and its mountaintop transmitter, changing only the name of the network it relayed.
Programming
WNGH carries exactly the same programming as the other eight full-power Georgia Public Broadcasting television stations. The unified schedule combines the national PBS service, including news, science, documentary, cultural and children's programming, with the network's Georgia-produced public affairs and documentary programs and its educational content for the state's schools, the descendant of the classroom instruction service for which the station was built in 1967. No programming is originated at Chatsworth; the station is a relay of the network feed produced principally in Atlanta. Its distinctiveness is geographic rather than editorial: it is the Georgia network's voice in the Chattanooga market, where it introduces Georgia state programming, including coverage of Georgia government and Georgia schools, to an audience that also lives within Tennessee's media orbit, and where its schedule overlaps in part with WTCI's PBS offerings across the state line.
Digital Conversion and the 2008 Difficulties
WCLP began its digital service in 2002, when its digital signal started on UHF channel 33. The final analog years were troubled: because of equipment failure in 2008, the station's analog signal operated at reduced power, about thirty percent of normal, until the analog service ended altogether. Georgia Public Broadcasting's stations shut down their analog signals on February 17, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television, and WNGH's analog channel 18 went silent on that date. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 33, using program and system information protocol to display virtual channel 18 to viewers. The station thus entered the digital-only era on the same RF channel it had used since 2002, below full authorized analog-era power having marked its last months, and with its channel identity unchanged for the audience.
The 2008 Call Sign Change to WNGH
On April 15, 2008, after more than forty years, WCLP-TV changed its call sign to WNGH-TV. The change was driven by radio. On December 21, 2007, North Georgia Radio Group agreed to sell the Chatsworth commercial radio station WQMT, a classic country station branded as Georgia 99, to the Foundation for Public Broadcasting in Georgia, the foundation associated with Georgia Public Broadcasting; the Federal Communications Commission approved the sale on April 9, 2008. The radio station switched to Georgia Public Broadcasting programming on January 2, 2008, and GPB reserved the call sign WNGH-FM for it, standing for North Georgia Highlands. Rather than rename the radio station to match the television station, GPB chose to change the television call sign to WNGH-TV so the two would match, even though the call letters WCLP-FM had been available for the radio station. The television station therefore gave up a call sign it had used since its inception in 1967 in favor of a shared local identity with the new radio service, and the radio transmitter moved to the television tower in Fort Mountain State Park the following month. Effective June 30, 2016, the foundation donated WNGH-FM to the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission, making the commission the direct licensee of both Chatsworth stations.
Translators in the Mountains
WNGH's service has long been extended by low-power translator stations placed to fill the gaps the mountains create. All of its translators have been located near Georgia's borders with Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina, where coverage from a full-power transmitter is insufficient because of distance and terrain. The surviving translator is W25FP-D on channel 25 at Young Harris, rebroadcasting WNGH with 5 kilowatts from a height of 687.7 meters, over 2,250 feet, one of the highest translator sites in the state. Its history illustrates the churn of mountain relay engineering: an earlier Young Harris translator, W04BJ, operated on channel 4 at a different location, went permanently off the air because of equipment failure in May 2008, and shared a facility identity with its digital successor because it was flash-cut to digital when it was moved and changed channels; another relay, W12DK-D, was licensed in December 2009 atop Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia. Several other network translators elsewhere in north Georgia have been abandoned and their licenses canceled at the network's request, apparently because of the expense of operating and upgrading them.
Repack to Channel 4 and Present Service
The national spectrum repack eventually moved WNGH off the UHF channel it had used for digital broadcasting since 2002. Network listings now show the station operating on low-band VHF RF channel 4, while retaining virtual channel 18 for viewers. The move follows Georgia Public Broadcasting's general practice of placing its stations on VHF, where the effective radiated power required is far lower than on UHF, typically tens of kilowatts rather than up to a thousand, which reduces both transmitter purchase costs and electricity consumption. For mountain viewers the change had a practical side: low-band VHF reception generally requires a larger antenna than UHF, and some Chattanooga-area viewers reported losing the station after its move to channel 4 despite receiving it well before, a common experience with low-band digital signals in hilly terrain. WNGH's multiplex carries the network's four streams: channel 18.1 with the main Georgia Public Broadcasting and PBS service in high definition, channel 18.2 with Create, channel 18.3 with GPB Knowledge and World Channel programming, and channel 18.4 with PBS Kids. The network's headquarters are in Atlanta and its website is gpb.org. Nearly six decades after it signed on as WCLP, the station on the mountain above Chatsworth remains northwest Georgia's link to the statewide public broadcasting service.
