The 680 foot tower at WQLN was damaged during the wind storms we had on September 15. The damage knocked them off the air completely for several weeks. The good news is that workers have been repairing the tower, but the bad news is that when they started examining the damage, it was worse then expected. From WQLN President Dwight Miller:

Engineers attempting to install the temporary antenna discovered that nearly all of WQLN TV’s transmission line was also damaged. A transmission line is a broadcaster’s aorta—it’s the main artery that delivers programming to over a quarter million homes. The 680’ transmission line is composed of 38 twenty-foot sections of conduit that more closely resembles a city water-main rather than a piece of electronics. With the addition of repairing the faulty transmission line our recovery plan was dramatically altered.

Two weekends ago, I was at the station and took this picture of workers on the tower. You’ll have to view the full-size image to really see them. It doesn’t look terribly tall in the picture but standing at the base of the tower, it really is tall and scary, and they were only 200 feet or so in the air. They had to lower each damaged section all the way down first, then carry up new pieces.

Since the transition to digital is so close, WQLN is now and will only be broadcasting in digital. If you have a digital tuner in your TV or a converter box, no worries, you’ll get it just fine. Same goes if you receive the channel over cable.