Technical Profile: WJAQ

FM Technical Profile: WJAQ

Station Name:: Real Country
Frequency:: 100.9
Format:: Country
Transmitter Location:: [map] [street view] South Street, about a half mile east of the intersection of Penn Avenue.
Power (ERP):: 6 kW
Antenna:: Nondirectional
Antenna HAAT:: 315 feet
Other Information:: 60 dBu protected contour map, from the FCC.
More Information:: [FCC]; [FCCdata]; [Radio-Locator]; [Wikipedia]

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[Article] From the Jackson County Floridian on the storm damage to the radio station, with pictures.

[Studio] Street View imagery for the station's studio on US-90 in Marianna.
Owner:: Jackson Radio Group, LLC
History:: An original construction permit was issued to The Chipola Corporation in 1963, for a new FM station to compliment their AM station WTOT in Marianna. The station signed on in 1964 as WTOT-FM, with 3 kW of power transmitted by a Collins 830-D1A transmitter into a Collins 37M four-bay antenna, located on the same tower as their AM station west of town off Edgewood Drive. The studios were at the corner of Market and Green Streets in downtown Marianna. It appears to have been programmed separately from the AM, although the format isn't listed in early editions of the Broadcasting Yearbook.

The license of the station along with its AM sister station were transferred to Marianna Broadcasting Corporation in 1975. One year later, the call sign changed to WJAQ.

By 1980, the format was listed as Adult Contemporary.

By 1990, the station was doing Contemporary Country, carrying ABC's satellite-fed "Real Country" network. The station and its sister AM were acquired by MFR, Inc. in 1996.

The license was transferred from MFR, Inc. to Jackson Radio Group in April 2015. In April 2017, a strong line of thunderstorms moved through the area and toppled part of the AM tower that housed the WJAQ antenna. It forced both this station and their AM sister station (who'd just re-built the transmitter site!) off the air. The station resumed operations from a temporary auxiliary antenna site just a few days later.

In mid-May 2019, the station was granted a permit to relocate to a new tower site from the old one (the WTOT-AM tower) off US-90 west of Marianna. A license to cover for that facility was filed in June 2022.

The station was silenced on 7 May 2023 when the tower holding the station's antenna, along with that of WTOT-AM's FM translator, was felled by an errant backhoe. A Resumption of Operations wasn't filed until nearly one year later in May 2024.