WIFT
| City | DuBois, Pennsylvania |
|---|---|
| Broadcast area |
DuBois, Pennsylvania Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania Clearfield, Pennsylvania |
| Branding | Bigfoot Country 102.1 & 101.3 |
| Slogan | Today's Hot Country |
| Frequency | 102.1 MHz |
| First air date | 1948 |
| Format | Country |
| ERP | 28,000 watts |
| HAAT | 202 meters |
| Class | B |
| Facility ID | 67696 |
| Transmitter coordinates | 41°2′43.0″N 78°42′11.0″W / 41.045278°N 78.703056°W |
| Callsign meaning | W BIgFooT |
| Former callsigns | WCED-FM (1948-1981) WOWQ (1981-2000) WMOU-FM (2000-2002) WOWQ (2002-2017) |
| Affiliations |
WJAC-TV for news and weather |
| Owner | Kristin Cantrell (Southern Belle, LLC) |
| Sister stations | WLUI, WLAK, WMRF-FM, WZWW, WZDB, WKFT |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | lovemybigfoot.com |
WIFT (102.1 FM, "Bigfoot Country 102.1 & 101.3") is a country music formatted broadcast radio station licensed to DuBois, Pennsylvania, serving the DuBois/Punxsutawney/Clearfield area. WIFT is owned and operated by Kristin Cantrell, through licensee Southern Belle, LLC.
For many years, the then-WOWQ had been the sister station of WCED, also licensed to DuBois. The station made its debut seven years after WCED first signed on. Like many FM stations that were part of an AM portfolio, this station made its debut as WCED-FM, simulcasting its AM sister for portions of the broadcast day, separating for a period during the day as part of a 1965 FCC mandate requiring combination AM/FM licensees to originate separate programming for at least half of the broadcast day.
In 1981, the separate-programming rule was repealed by the FCC, but WCED-FM went the opposing direction and adopted the call letters WOWQ and the moniker Q102, becoming a fully independent station with its own programming. It began this identity initially with a Top 40 format, mostly automated. By 1988, the station had switched its format from Top 40 to Country, and began putting live local DJs on during the daytime hours, with a satellite-delivered country music format programmed offsite from another location during the evening hours. Though the format had changed, the Q102 moniker was retained. It was at this time that the station had begun pretty much what it is today.
WOWQ and WCED were also two of the very first stations in the U.S. to use hard-disk audio storage technology in the early 1990s, developed by Computer Concepts Corporation.
The station has also long been home to the Sunday Morning Polka Party with "Big Moose", which airs from 9am to Noon on Sundays.
Tri-County Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Oil City, PA-based Derrick Publishing (which publishes the Oil City Derrick and the Clarion News daily newspapers), had owned WCED and WOWQ since its inception in 1948. Company president E. Michael Boyle decided to sell both stations to Vox Media in 1999.
Upon acquisition, Vox Media changed WOWQ's call letters to WMOU-FM in December 2000 and adopted the moniker "Moo 102", though it maintained the popular country music format. The move was made to presumably create the same top-of-mind-recall generated by its competitors in Altoona, whose stations were branded as "Froggy". Vox Media then decided to put both WOWQ and WCED up for sale, with WOWQ being sold in October 2001 to First Media Radio, LLC, for $4.2 million. WCED would be spun off to another owner five years later.
...
Wikipedia