WNBC

WNBC (channel 4) is a television station in New York City. It is the flagship station of the NBC television network, owned and operated through its NBC Owned Television Stations division. Under common ownership with Linden, New Jersey–licensed Telemundo outlet WNJU (channel 47), the two stations share studios and offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, co-located with NBC's corporate headquarters, and broadcast from the same transmitter at One World Trade Center; WNJU's facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, also serve as WNBC's New Jersey news bureau.

WNBC holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating commercial television station in the United States.

History

Experimental operations

What is now WNBC traces its history to experimental station W2XBS, founded by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA, a co-founder of the National Broadcasting Company), in 1928, just two years after NBC was founded as the first nationwide radio network. Originally a test bed for the experimental RCA Photophone theater television system, W2XBS used the low-definition mechanical television scanning system. Later it was used mostly for reception and interference tests. The call letters W2XBS meant W2XB-south, with W2XB being the call letters of the first experimental station, started a few months earlier at General Electric's (GE) main factory in Schenectady, New York, which evolved into today's WRGB. GE was the parent company of both RCA and NBC, and technical research was done at the Schenectady plant.

The station originally broadcast on the frequencies of 2.0 to 2.1 MHz. In 1929, W2XBS upgraded its transmitter and broadcast facilities to handle transmissions of 60 vertical lines at 20 frames per second, on the frequencies of 2.75 to 2.85 MHz.