Site of the Week 3/28/2025: A Day in Northwest New Jersey

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

Sometimes it’s nice to have a friend with a Jeep. Sure, we’ve recently upgraded our own tower-hunting wheels to a very capable Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness, but you’d be amazed how many sites in close proximity to very big cities are still tough to access without a really good 4×4.

And if you think New Jersey is all suburban sprawl, multi-lane turnpikes and flat beaches, allow us to introduce you to Sussex County, the very un-Jersey-stereotype at the state’s northwest corner, where it meets up with the edges of the Catskills and the Poconos in some very rugged terrain.

In light traffic (ha!), it’s barely an hour from the George Washington Bridge up I-80 west to US 206 and up to Newton, where we find the oldest station in the region.

What’s now WTOC (1360) goes back to early 1954, when it signed on as 500-watt daytimer WNNJ, owned by a consortium that included future New England FM pioneer Simon Geller. By 1956, Geller and his original partners were out of the picture, and it was Simpson Wolfe and his family who carried the station forward for the next few decades. WNNJ added an FM station in 1962 (more on that in a bit), and eventually went full-time with 2 kW day and 320 watts at night with the two towers that still stand off Yates Avenue on the southeast side of Newton.

The WNNJ stations ended up with Nassau Broadcasting and then Clear Channel, which flipped the AM to WTOC (“True Oldies Channel”) in 2008, then spun the AM off entirely to the Spanish-language church group that still owns it. WTOC later added an FM translator (with the help of Fybush Media) on 95.9, closer to the studio location in Dover.

Go north of Newton on US 206, approaching the Garden State’s high point (cleverly named “High Point”) up along the Appalachian Trail, and if you go up Gigi Lane just north of Culver Lake, you’ll come up to the ridge where WNNJ (103.7) has been located for almost 40 years now.

If you do come up here to Harmony Ridge, though, you’ll really want that buddy with the Jeep (in this case, Mike Fitzpatrick of NECRAT.us), because the “road” turns into just a rocky hill as you get near the top – and even Mike’s Jeep ended up blowing a tire near the top of the ascent, slowing our day a little as we stopped to change it out while admiring the rugged tower that’s home to 103.7 and the view from the nearby fire tower.

(WNNJ also still has an old FM antenna mounted on the WTOC AM site, though it’s no longer in use.)

Not long after 103.7 moved up here, its owners struck a complex deal with two adjacent-channel stations, the 103.5 serving New York City and WPRB 103.3 in Princeton, to shift their signals around a bit, primarily to allow 103.5 (WAPP, later WYNY and WKTU) to become a full-signal FM from the World Trade Center and then the Empire State Building, but with WNNJ taking a downgrade as a result. (It would eventually be co-owned with WKTU under iHeart).

Even so, WNNJ’s classic rock format still has big reach as a class B1 FM up here more than 1500 feet above sea level, and it’s a long way back down to nearby Franklin, which is where we find the building that houses what’s left of iHeart’s regional studios. In addition to WNNJ, the company ended up with most of the rest of the commercial radio dial up here: WSUS (102.3 Franklin) is the area’s legacy AC station, while WHCY 106.3 to the south near Blairstown does country (“the Bear”) for nearby Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania and the Poconos.

Before saying goodbye to Newton, we stop by a station that’s rather important in the Fybush household. Not only has Fybush Media helped out over the years with licensing for WRSK-LP (97.5), the radio station of Sussex County Community College, but Lisa’s “Tragical History Tour” Beatles radio show proudly counts “Cruizin’ Oldies 97.5” as one of her affiliates every weekend.

The connection here runs through New Jersey’s own Tony Dee, who engineers WTOC, formerly engineered most of the iHeart stations in the region, and who programs WRSK-FM for the college, using the oldies format that used to be on WTOC.

Funny thing about this particular set of tours – Tony arranged them remotely for us, providing the code to get in to see WTOC, and calling up the college’s maintenance crew to let us in to the WRSK studio and transmitter room. This is a rather new college, having started only in 1981, and it didn’t get a campus until 1989, when it bought the hilltop site of the defunct Don Bosco College.

The old Don Bosco building is now where WRSK is located, with the studio down the hall from the college gym, which is located in what was once the Don Bosco chapel. There’s weightlifting where the altar used to be, and if you get the maintenance crew to unlock the closet behind the old altar, that’s where the WRSK-LP transmitter is neatly tucked into a rack, feeding the antenna that sits up where the steeple used to be.

We’ve gotten a bit out of order here, so let’s return our attention to Franklin, or rather to the area just east of town on Hamburg Mountain. That’s where we find WSUS, which signed on up here in 1965 as Louis VanderPlatte’s WLVP, operating from a studio and transmitter adjoining his house. The studio eventually moved into town, in a former train station, and it’s just the transmitter up here on the mountain, giving this class A signal impressive reach from a height above sea level almost equal to WNNJ’s.

As we Jeep our way around the very rocky road that leads up to WSUS, we pass a much newer station a little lower on the mountain: WNJP (88.5 Sussex) hit the air here in 1998, part of the state-run NJN’s expansion from public TV into public radio. NJN also added a TV translator here, which remains on the air as W23EX-D on channel 23.

While the state still owns the site and the TV license, the radio network was split up during state budget cuts, making WNJP part of the New Jersey Public Radio network fed from New York’s WNYC. The TV network is now NJ PBS, run by New York’s WNET.

And don’t miss a big batch of where IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Thanks to Tony Dee for the tours!

Next week: Stroudsburg and the Poconos!