WTON-AM in Staunton, Virginia is transmitting again, roughly a year after owner Thomas Media was evicted from the station's transmitter site, co-owner Joe Thomas said.
According to Thomas, the station kept serving listeners during the outage by operating under special temporary authority (STA) on its two FM repeaters, one in Harrisonburg and one in Charlottesville. An STA is a short-term FCC grant that lets a station operate in a way its license does not normally allow, often used when a site is lost or damaged and a permanent fix is still being built and approved.
Thomas credited station engineer Alan Williams, engineers at Kintronics, and attorney Patrick Cross of Brooks-Pierce with getting the FCC's approval to return the AM signal to the air. He did not hide how close the finish was. "Ask my high school teachers. All my projects were done just in the nick of time!" Thomas said.
The timing matters for any AM operator in a similar spot. Under the Communications Act, a broadcast license generally expires automatically if the station fails to transmit a signal for 12 consecutive months, so losing a site can quickly become a license problem as well as an engineering one. Details of the new site and the technical parameters the FCC approved were not disclosed.
The station's return came alongside recognition from the Virginia Association of Broadcasters, which gave Thomas Media its CT Lucy Lifetime Achievement award and its 2026 Best Newscast award.
Stations facing a lease loss or forced site move should keep a close eye on their own silence dates and STA expirations, and check their records in the FCC's database.