WRGB (channel 6) is a television station licensed to Schenectady, New York, United States, serving the Capital District as an affiliate of CBS. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside CW affiliate WCWN (channel 45). The two stations share studios on Balltown Road in Niskayuna, New York; WRGB's transmitter is located on the Helderberg Escarpment west of New Salem.
WRGB is notable for being one of the first television stations in the world. It began broadcasting experimentally in early 1928, with the first daily programs being broadcast later that year. It later became one of a handful of television stations licensed for commercial broadcasting operation before the end of World War II, being the fourth overall to sign on and by far the smallest TV station during World War II.
The station launched the on-camera careers of TV chefs Art "Mr. Food" Ginsburg in the mid-1970s; and of Rachael Ray, who launched her "30 Minute Meals" segment on WRGB's newscasts in the mid-1990s.
History W2XCW One of the first experimental television stations in the world, WRGB traces its roots to an experimental station founded on January 13, 1928, and broadcast from the General Electric facility in Schenectady under the call letters W2XCW. It was popularly known as "WGY Television" after its sister radio station (though WMAK, the predecessor of modern station WBEN in Buffalo also had partial control of the station, which was relinquished shortly after the station signed on). W2XCW operated a very limited schedule, with 30 kW on 2.1–2.2 MHz (video) and 92 meters (approx. 3.258 MHz) (audio). It transmitted 24 vertical lines of resolution at a rate of 20 frames per second. As of July that year, it broadcast from 1:30 to 2pm Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and 10:15 to 10:30pm Sundays.
W2XAF The W2XCW callsign disappeared around 1932. By 1930, GE had begun audio transmission on shortwave; one of these transmitters, W2XAF, was pressed into service during off-hours for further television experiments, which continued through the 1930s. Toward the end of that decade, General Electric teamed up with other experimental broadcasters to adopt an all-electronic TV standard that was created by RCA.
W2XB In 1938, General Electric announced plans to build and operate a standalone TV station, and applied for an FCC license. It was granted the callsign W2XB, which took to the air in 1939. It moved into the VHF band using a 6 MHz-wide channel and improved resolution (gradually increasing from 343 to 441 to 525 lines). In 1940, it began sharing programs with W2XBS (forerunner of WNBC) in New York City, receiving the New York station directly off the air from a mountaintop and rebroadcasting the signal, becoming NBC's first television affiliate. Later, the New York connection was achieved via coaxial cable and eventually by satellite. The NBC affiliation would last for 42 years.
WRGB
In 1942, W2XB opted to end experimental broadcasts and begin commercial programming. While the call sign WGY-TV was available, the company applied for and received the call sign WRGB, in honor of pioneering electric engineer Walter Ransom Gail Baker. WRGB signed on for the first time as a commercial station on February 26, 1942; becoming the second outside of New York City (after WPTZ in Philadelphia, now KYW-TV) and the fourth overall in the United States. The station moved into a state-of-the-art studio on Washington Avenue in Schenectady. It was the first building in the nation specifically designed for television.
In 1948, WRGB took on secondary affiliations with the three other networks in operation (CBS, ABC, and DuMont). At the time of the announcement, the station only broadcast for 28 hours a week. On January 4, 1954, it moved from channel 4 to channel 6 to alleviate interference from WNBC-TV (then known as WRCA-TV) and Boston's WBZ-TV, and increased its radiated power approximately fourfold to 93,000 watts. WRGB dropped its secondary affiliations when WCDA (channel 41, now WTEN on channel 10) and WTRI (channel 35, now WNYT on channel 13) took the ABC and CBS affiliations respectively. From 1939 till 1957, the station's studio were located on Washington Avenue in downtown Schenectady. In 1957, WRGB moved to its current studio on Balltown Road on the line between Niskayuna and Schenectady; the old studio is currently occupied by Schenectady County Community College.
The longest-running locally produced children's television show, Freihofer's Breadtime Stories was broadcast on the station starting November 21, 1949. WRGB produced two of the longest-running locally produced programs in television history: a quiz show called Answers Please and a bowling program entitled TV Tournament Time. After the cancellation of both by the late-1980s, WRGB's local programming has been variable and erratic, ranging from a local home shopping show to a weekly video countdown done with Top 40 stations WFLY and (later) WKKF.
In 1979, General Electric almost filed to sell WRGB to Group Six Broadcasting during a proposed General Electric merger with Cox Broadcasting, with Group Six being led by the station's general manager and vice president James J. Delmonico, which paid $24 million, but the deal apparently fell through due to a lack of FCC approval.
On September 28, 1981, WRGB swapped affiliations with WAST (which would become what is now WNYT on the day of the switch) and became a CBS affiliate. WAST had only picked up the CBS affiliation four years earlier, but had remained stubbornly in third place behind WRGB and WTEN. Under the circumstances, when its affiliation contract with WAST ran out, CBS jumped at the chance to align with long-dominant WRGB. The switch made WRGB the third station in the Capital District to affiliate with CBS, with the newly rechristened WNYT taking over the NBC affiliation. The network had originally aired on WTRI, forerunner of WNYT, from 1954 to 1955, then moved to WCDA (now WTEN) from 1955 to 1977.
In August 1983, 41 years of General Electric ownership ended when it sold WRGB to Universal Communications Corporation which was owned by Forstmann Little and John D. Backe, a former CBS president and then president of Tomorrow Entertainment (GE would re-enter the TV business upon its purchase of RCA, then-parent company of NBC in late 1985, which WRGB was formerly affiliated with). WRGB was sold to Freedom Communications in March 1986. In 1987, WRGB won the Broadcast Pioneers Golden Mike Award and shortly thereafter was awarded a Presidential Citation by Ronald Reagan.
In September 2003, WRGB-DT (UHF channel 39) became the first full-market digital signal to sign on in the Albany region. Around December 2007, WRGB and WCWN became the first television stations in the Capital District that upgraded to high definition time delay and rebroadcast capability, and high definition local broadcasts. This allows broadcasting of syndicated shows in high definition. WRGB changed its on-air name to "CBS 6" in October 2004.
Providence Equity Partners owned a controlling stake in Newport Television (formerly Clear Channel Communications' television division), the owner of local Fox affiliate WXXA (channel 23). As a result, the FCC granted conditional approval of Newport's acquisition of Clear Channel Television in late November 2007, provided that Providence Equity Partners would follow through with its planned divestiture of its 16 percent share of Freedom Communications to another company (as required when Providence Equity Partners purchased a minority stake in the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision earlier in 2007) as soon as the deal was finalized. Freedom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2009, emerging in April 2010. At that point, Providence Equity Partners relinquished its stake in Freedom Communications, making its purchase of WXXA legitimate.
Freedom announced on November 2, 2011, that it would bow out of television and sell its stations, including WRGB, to Sinclair Broadcast Group. The group deal closed on April 2, 2012, after which Sinclair obtained a waiver allowing the company to keep both WRGB and WCWN. In 2016, WRGB adopted a logo similar to that of sister station WSYX in Columbus, Ohio, replacing the ABC logo with that of the CBS eye.
FM audio WRGB's former analog TV signal used an FM audio carrier which could be heard on 87.75 FM in areas where the video signal could be received (and somewhere it could not); the same was true of all analog channel 6 television stations in North America. Many channel 6 stations would then promote this avenue for commuters to listen to their morning and early evening newscasts, or severe weather and breaking news coverage on their car stereos, including WRGB.
However, this analog FM carrier no longer existed for digital television stations after the June 12, 2009, conversion to digital, but remained in effect for analog low-powered stations on channel 6 until they too transitioned on July 13, 2021, where now only a few stations are broadcasting an FM audio carrier signal on 87.75 alongside an ATSC 3.0 carrier signal.
When WRGB shifted its digital broadcasts to channel 6 with the full-power digital transition, Freedom proposed an unconventional approach to retain the analog audio broadcast, requesting to operate an analog FM radio transmitter at the far right edge of its allocated spectrum, using vertical polarization to retain compatibility with standard broadcast car stereos.The Mystique of Channel 6, James E. O'Neal, TV Technology, February 26, 2009 This idea was once proposed by New York City's WNYZ-LP in 2008. According to WRGB's site, "We hope that the FCC will allow us to continue to operate on 87.7. We are building a unique transmitter for 87.7 that can operate simultaneously with our DTV signal on channel 6. TV transmissions always use horizontal antennas. Our new 87.7 transmitter will be vertically polarized. The use of vertical polarization for 87.7 will allow reception of our audio in a car radio or any other FM radio with a whip type antenna."DTV
WRGB would be the only full-power station to propose such a solution, with only WITI in Milwaukee attempting to continue to carry its Channel 6 television audio in some form by contracting with Clear Channel to lease an HD Radio subchannel of radio station WMIL-FM until the mid-2010s. WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, the nearest full-power channel 6, expressed an interest in the technology, but backed off due to overall rights issues for its programming and continuing issues regarding reception of their station throughout the market (which would have been complicated more by side-channel analog audio).
The station received an experimental special temporary authorization from the FCC to allow it to test the FM audio system but it had to cease operations when it was found to cause RF interference with the digital TV signal.
On July 7, 2009, WRGB resumed its radio simulcast broadcasts on a frequency of 87.9 FM, without explicit FCC authorization. Less than two months later, on August 24, the FCC ordered WRGB to turn off the 87.9 transmitter. All efforts to carry an analog FM audio signal were abandoned with the sale of WRGB to Sinclair (a company that is a major stakeholder in the ATSC 3.0 standard), and its 2022 shift to UHF transmission made any renewal of the effort impossible as it no longer has access to the VHF channel 6 spectrum.
Power boost and proposed translators