City Wilson, North Carolina Owner Career Communications | Frequency 1420 kHz | |
Format Urban contemporary gospel Power 1,000 Watts (day)
500 Watts (night) Callsign meaning Wilson's Voice Of Tobacco or Wilson's Voice Of Truth | ||
WVOT (1420 AM) is a radio station licensed to and located in Wilson, North Carolina, USA. The FCC assigned frequency is 1420 kHz. The station operates at 1000 Watts non-directional by day, and 500 watts directional at night, largely on a north-facing axis.
Contents
Programming
The current format is urban contemporary gospel. Past formats have included talk, Carolina beach music, oldies, adult contemporary, contemporary hit radio, and block programming. The station's call letters originally stood for W-V(oice)-O(f)-T(obbacoland.)
History
The original studio/transmitter building was located across from the Wilson city operation center on East Herring Avenue. The small brick and frame building held the business office, advertising office, production studio, news room, "on-air" control-room/studio, and transmitter. Though space was limited and spartan, the studio provided a venue for interviewing a variety of celebrities, including Tiny Tim.
Career Communications bought WVOT in 1990.
WVOT switched to a Beach Music format in 1992, later switching to news/talk.
In 1997, Career Communications sold the station to Al Taylor's Taylor Group Broadcasting. During this time, the call letters were changed to WALQ.
In 1999, Gerald Winborne, owner of the Jackson Street studio property, donated the house and land to Christ Temple of Praise Church.
In 2001, Taylor Group Broadcasting sold the station to Kingdom Expansion Corp. to be operated by Christ Temple of Praise Church. The call letters were later changed back to WVOT.
In 2003, Announcer Frederick Mason won $1,000 in back wages after the State Department of Labor ruled he wasn't paid minimum wage.
WVOT was off the air for several months in 2008 after losing the lease to the Herring Avenue transmitter site. In 2009 engineers erected a temporary wire antenna at the Jackson Street studio to get the station back on the air.
WVOT is again transmitting from the Herring Avenue tower site. The studios are located on Ward Boulevard in Wilson near Ralph L. Fike High School.
The Fire
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the station signed off the air each night at midnight. The duties of the last announcer of the evening included recording the weather forecast on a 24-hour answering machine "The WVOT 24-Hour Weather Center", cleaning up the control room (food boxes, ash trays, etc.) and locking up the station for the five hours or so it would be un-occupied before the morning airstaff arrived.
In one corner of the control room was a pre-internet relic of broadcasting, a teleprinter, which spewed yards and yards of paper throughout an air shift. One further responsibility of the night announcer was clearing the wire service area of the accumulated teleprinter paper. Unfortunately, one night in 1992 an announcer completed all of his duties, including throwing away all the wire-service paper, and emptying the ash tray from the control room into the same trash can. The blaze destroyed the building.
Within months under the continued leadership of Rick Mendleson, after operating in temporary buildings at the transmitter site, the studios were moved to an historic house on Jackson Street in downtown Wilson. A new transmitter building was erected on the original Herring Avenue tower site.
WRDU-FM
In 1984, Century Communications sold WVOT-WXYY to Voyager Communications. The FM was moved to Raleigh and the call letters were changed to WRDU. A new tower site for WRDU (now WTKK) was built near Middlesex, North Carolina. The AM facility remained in Wilson.