WFAT
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| City | Orange-Athol, Massachusetts |
|---|---|
| Branding | The Big 700 WFAT |
| Slogan | The Greatest Music of All Time |
| Frequency | 700 kHz |
| First air date | May 13, 1956 (as WCAT at 1390) |
| Format | Oldies |
| Power | 2,500 watts (daytime only) |
| Class | D |
| Facility ID | 51118 |
| Transmitter coordinates | 42°35′06″N 72°16′56″W / 42.58500°N 72.28222°W |
| Former callsigns | WCAT (1956–1987) WPNS (1987–1988) WCAT (1988–2005) WJOE (2005–2009) WVBB (2009) WTUB (2009–2014) WWBZ (April 30–September 1, 2014) |
| Former frequencies | 1390 kHz (1956-1983) |
| Owner | Northeast Broadcasting Company, Inc. (County Broadcasting Company, LLC) |
| Sister stations | WFNX |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | WFAT website |
WFAT (700 AM) is a radio station licensed to serve Orange-Athol, Massachusetts, United States. The station is owned by County Broadcasting Company, LLC, a subsidiary of Northeast Broadcasting, itself controlled by Steve Silberberg. It broadcasts an oldies radio format, under the "Big 700" branding.
WFAT signed on May 13, 1956 as WCAT, operating on 1390 AM. Original owner Miller's River Broadcasting sold the station to Tri-State Radio in 1960, who in turn sold it to Berkshire Broadcasting in 1969. By 1971, the station had a middle-of-the-road format, which it would retain into the 1980s, as the station was sold to P&S Broadcasting in 1975.
In 1983, WCAT moved to its current position on 700. The station changed its call letters to WPNS, reflecting its ownership, in 1987; after just over a year, however, the station reverted to WCAT. WCAT subsequently discontinued locally originated programming; by 1996, the station was a talk radio station, affiliated with the Talk America network. An FM sister station on 99.9 FM (now WFNX) was launched on December 4, 1989.
In 1998, P&S sold WCAT and WCAT-FM to CAT Communications Corporation (a company controlled by Jeff Shapiro), who in turn sold the stations to Citadel Broadcasting in 2000. Citadel operated the WCAT stations as part of its Worcester group of stations, even though Arbitron considered the stations to be within the Boston market. Several months after Citadel took over, WCAT went silent while its tower was replaced, putting the station in danger of having its license canceled by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for failing to broadcast for a year; when it returned in late October 2001, just before its November 1 deadline to do so, it simulcast the oldies format of WCAT-FM. By the following year, WCAT had been leased out to a Spanish language operator that implemented a religious format.
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