Site of the Week 4/4/2025: From the Poconos to Scranton

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

If you live in western New York and drive to New York City often, there’s a sign that you might see in the visitor center along I-81: “Yes, you are in Pennsylvania. Yes, this is the fastest way to NYC.”

As a frequent traveler along that route, we’ve seen that sign – and we’ve spent lots of time on that route down I-81 to I-380 to I-80 and back through New Jersey into the city. But what we hadn’t done, oddly enough, was spend much time actually seeing the sites along that Pennsylvania leg of the journey, an omission we rectified in the fall of 2023 in a couple of jam-packed days traveling with Mike Fitzpatrick of NECRAT.us.

Just as with some of the sites we showed you in northwestern New Jersey last week, our first stop after crossing the Delaware Water Gap into Pennsylvania sits right along the Appalachian Trail as it crosses Tott’s Gap in the Kittatinny Mountains.

This former AT&T Long Lines tower is home to stations from both of the commercial broadcasters who serve nearby Stroudsburg and the Poconos: Seven Mountains Media’s WSBG (93.5 Stroudsburg) and Cumulus’ WWYY (107.1 Belvidere NJ) share that two-bay combined master antenna and the one-bay aux below it, while Seven Mountains’ 103.1 translator below relays “Poco 103” WVPO (840 Stroudsburg) – and from way up high on this ridge, almost 1500 feet above sea level, these class A and translator signals enjoy massively good coverage for what they are.

The other important FM site for Stroudsburg sits in the Poconos west of the small city and south of I-80 near the I-380 interchange. Up above the Camelback ski area, several towers along “Camelback Cell Tower Road” carry FM signals. Two of the Audacy stations from the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton market have relays here: WKRF (107.9 Tobyhanna) is a class A rebroadcaster of top-40 WKRZ (98.5), while country giant WGGY (101.3) from Scranton has an on-channel booster, WGGY-1, lower down on the same tower. (There’s also a 105.5 translator up here for Times Shamrock’s WEZX network, and we’ll see in a moment what feeds it.)

Just down the road, there are two more relays of out-of-town signals: Temple University’s WRTI network from Philadelphia is heard in this area on WRTY (91.1 Jackson Township), which sits above Four Rivers’ “Word FM” network’s WBYX (88.7 Stroudsburg) on a Temple-owned tower.

What’s in Stroudsburg itself?

There’s Stroudsburg University in East Stroudsburg, which has two transmitters on its campus. The college’s own station, WESS (90.3), has its two-bay antenna atop Lenape Hall, while the nearby college library’s roof hosts the translator for Scranton’s public radio station, W232AM (94.3), which relays WVIA (89.9), which we’ll see in our next installment.

There’s one AM station in Stroudsburg, which spent most of its long life known as WVPO, the Voice of the POconos. The daytimer on 840 off Bangor Mountain Road in East Stroudsburg actually started in 1947 as WHAB before taking the WVPO calls the next year. It eventually spawned WVPO-FM (93.5), which became WSBG, and it’s only in the last few years that a rearrangement of calls and formats in the market turned the 840 daytimer into WPCO, “Poco 103.” (Seven Mountains kept the WVPO calls alive in the market on its 96.7 signal from Lehman Township, which is now “Bigfoot Country 96.7 & 97.3,” feeding a translator in East Stroudsburg.)

On our way into Scranton, we have one more stop to make, west of I-380 in the heart of the Poconos.

The “Rock 107” signal from Scranton’s WEZX (106.9) has several outlying relay signals, including WPZX (105.9 Pocono Pines), which is located in a little resort community called Locust Lake Village in Arrowhead Lake.

Drive past the vacation homes up here and you find yourself looking at a little garden shed next to a phone pole, and that’s all there is to this class A signal (which also feeds the 105.5 translator in Stroudsburg).

We’ll see more of WEZX later in this Scranton trip, too, but we’re out of daylight for day one, so we continue the next morning in Duryea, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, where we drive past the three-tower array of WITK (1550) near the junction of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers.

This station used to be daytimer WARD on 1540 before getting a decent power upgrade in the 1980s, taking it to 5000 watts by day and 500 watts at night with a religious format.

Up next, at the north end of Scranton, we get a quick shot of the Marywood University station, WVMW (91.7), before we spend much of the rest of the day with the nice folks from Bold Gold Media.

Vince Benedetto has quietly grown his operations into more than a dozen stations spanning an area from Scranton across to the Honesdale-Hawley area and into New York’s Catskill Mountains, and he makes his Scranton home base up on West Mountain, where he occupies the studios on Sekol Road that started out as WICK (1400) and WWDL (104.9).

These days, WICK’s automated classic hits format (“the Mothership”) comes from one of the studios here, while another is home to the mostly-syndicated talk of “94.3 the Talker,” WTRW (94.3 Carbondale, which Bold Gold acquired along with WCDL 1440 Carbondale, a simulcast of the Mothership.)

From the WICK studios, Sekol Road continues steeply uphill past a gate to the top of West Mountain, an historic site in Scranton broadcasting.

One of the city’s original TV stations, WGBI-TV (Channel 22), hit the air from up here in 1953, bringing CBS to Scranton and much of northeastern PA. Like most of the market’s TV stations, it eventually moved to Penobscot Mountain, which reaches a broader swath of the region, but its original tower and transmitter building eventually saw reuse by WOLF-TV (Channel 38), which hit the air in the 1980s.

The WOLF-TV calls and Fox affiliation later moved up the dial to channel 56 from Penobscot, with 38 up here becoming CW affiliate WSWB.

A little ways down from the top of the hill, another tower is shared by 104.9, now WWRR (“105 the River”) and as by Pax/ion affiliate WQPX (Channel 64), which hit the air up here in 1998.

We didn’t get to see the WQPX facility in a locked back room, but we saw WWRR’s room, where two older unused transmitters sit next to the rack with the little BE STX transmitter that actually powers the 104.9 signal these days.

The STL just below it? That gets the programming from WWRR’s current studios, which are down at the Mohegan Sun casino in Wilkes-Barre, as we’ll see in a moment.

Where to next? We head off with Vince to see more of his transmitter sites, starting at WICK, which is tucked in next to a little park next to the Susquehanna Rover just east of the Scranton Expressway (US 11), north of downtown off Capouse Street.

This one’s an oldie but goodie – it hasn’t moved since the station signed on in 1954, though the current BE transmitter inside the shack is much newer, of course.

At one time, WICK was simulcasting with Wilkes-Barre’s oldest radio station. What’s now WYCK (1340), licensed to Plains, was the original WBRE(AM) back in 1925, part of the Baltimore family’s broadcast group that included WBRE-TV (Channel 28) and WBRE-FM (98.5, today’s WKRZ).

After losing its original site in the 1990s, 1340 moved to a new location up on the hill near the Wilkes-Barre VA hospital, where it put its transmitter in a military surplus communications shelter that has been rock solid over the years at keeping this signal on the air.

Running through a variety of formats, including a sports simulcast with WICK and WCDL for years as “the Game,” these days the AM exists mostly to bring “105 the River” into Wilkes-Barre, where it’s heard on the 100.7 translator on the WYCK tower.

And before we grab lunch with Vince and move along to more Scranton fun, we get to see the WWRR studios in the Mohegan Sun casino. If you’re walking in from the race track or parking garage, you go right down the hall past this showcase window with a huge “105 the River” sign advertising the station.

Inside, there’s live talent most of the day, plus some very well thought out video signage promoting the station’s substantial social media following.

After lunch with Vince and a tour of the casino, we’re off to see more of this market – but that will have to wait until next week’s installment!

And don’t miss all the station IDs you can hear from this area and elsewhere, at the relaunched TopHour.com!

Next week: Our Scranton trip continues