WECT

WECT (channel 6) is a television station in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by Gray Television, which provides certain services to Fox affiliate WSFX-TV (channel 26) under a shared services agreement (SSA) with American Spirit Media. Both stations share studios on Shipyard Boulevard in Wilmington, while WECT's transmitter is located near Winnabow, North Carolina.

History

Channel 6 began broadcasting on April 9, 1954 with the call sign WMFD-TV. It aired an analog signal on VHF channel 6 from a 941-foot transmitter near Delco. The station was owned by Atlantic Telecasting Corporation alongside Wilmington's oldest radio station, WMFD. Atlantic Telecasting sold off the radio station in 1958 and changed the television station's calls changed to the current WECT. The WMFD-TV call letters are now used by an independent television station in Mansfield, Ohio.

At its launch, channel 6 was affiliated with all four networks of the day—NBC, CBS, DuMont and ABC. However, it has always been a primary NBC affiliate. It lost DuMont when that network went silent in 1956. The station finally got local competition in 1964 when WWAY signed on. However, WWAY opted to affiliate with the much weaker ABC, forcing WECT to shoehorn NBC and CBS onto its schedule until the 1970s, when cable arrived in the Wilmington market. It primarily carried CBS soap operas and CBS' Sunday afternoon NFL coverage. At one point, this station was carried on cable systems in the Triangle region of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Fayetteville, and Chapel Hill) for a time when NBC did not have a full-time affiliate in that market. At one time, WECT had a Fayetteville news bureau.

In 1969, WECT moved to a tall tower near White Lake—among the tallest east of the Mississippi. From the 1970s to the 1980s, WECT was picked up by numerous cable systems from Fayetteville eastward. At one point, it was carried on cable as far west as Wadesboro and as far north as Greenville.http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/coals7/forms/search/cableSearchNf.cfm Due to its longstanding popularity, WECT is still carried on cable systems in the eastern portion of the Triangle market, including Fayetteville and Southern Pines. It is also available on cable in Jacksonville, which is part of the Greenville–Washington– New Bern market.

For its first half-century on the air, the station served as the default NBC affiliate for the northern and eastern portions of the Florence–Myrtle Beach, South Carolina market, including Myrtle Beach itself. That market was one of the last on the East Coast without its own NBC affiliate. It was carried on cable as far south as Georgetown, South Carolina. Well into the 1990s, it identified as "Wilmington/Myrtle Beach" to acknowledge its viewership on the Grand Strand. However, WECT's signal was somewhat weak on the North Carolina side of the market, such as Laurinburg.

Atlantic Telecasting sold the station to the News-Press & Gazette Company in 1986. That company then sold its entire station group to the first incarnation of New Vision Television in 1993. New Vision turned around and sold its entire group to Ellis Communications in 1995. Ellis was folded into Raycom Media in 1997. In 2006, Raycom bought out the Liberty Corporation, owner of WWAY. However, FCC duopoly rules forced Raycom to spin off WWAY to Morris Multimedia as a condition of the Raycom–Liberty merger.

On May 8, 2008, the FCC announced that five stations in Wilmington (including WECT) had agreed to voluntarily cease analog broadcasting on September 8 http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-282032A1.pdf five months ahead of the February 17, 2009 tentative date for television stations to complete the analog-to-digital transition.http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-06-1082A2.pdf WECT TV6 - WECT.com - Wilmington, NC news and weather - Wilmington Goes Digital First
/ref> The market was used by the FCC as a pre-transition test market. After the digital transition, WGNI radio agreed to air emergency weather information from WECT. Previously, because channel 6 is adjacent to the FM band, its broadcasts could be heard on FM 87.7.

WECT's coverage has been reduced as a result of the digital transition which left the station on UHF. The move of the station's transmitter by from south of White Lake to Winnabow left Fayetteville viewers unable to watch the station over the air.Michael Futch, "No more WECT on radio since transition," ''The Fayetteville Observer'', March 26, 2009, Business section. The station's former transmitter was located in Bladen County

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