I've mentioned Steve Silberberg's “Point” AAA network a few times so far. The flagship station of the network is a Montpelier-licensed station, WNCS (104.7C2), which transmits from a tower on Ricker Mountain, overlooking the Bolton Valley ski area, where I grew up. Its studios are still located on the Barre-Montpelier Road, even though the current FCC rules would allow them to be located in the Burlington area. However, the vagaries of topography make the WNCS signal actually in Montpelier rather less in practice than the FCC's models predict. So in 1992, two years after moving WNCS from its old 96.7A facility up to Bolton, Silberberg put a Montpelier translator on the air. It was not long after the FCC had changed its rules to allow translators on channels other than the former class-A channels, so the new translator, W262AA, was the first translator granted on 100.3 east of the Mississippi.
The tower is located on North Street, which climbs an unnamed north-south ridge on the north side of downtown Montpelier. There's an outstanding construction permit to increase power from the licensed 16 watts to 100 watts.
Copyright 2009, Garrett Wollman. All rights reserved. Photograph taken 2009-03-22.