I worked at WSPB when the 275' self supporting tower was erected. It was in 1970/71. That was the original 102.5 WYAK tower. It originally was located on 5th street, just west of Central Avenue. 102.5 was in the building that is still there on 5th street in Sarasota just west of Central Avenue. WYAK was in the western most store. There is a vacant lot west of that building now. There was a junk yard there in the 60-70's and the tower was in the junk yard. The condo west of there was not there yet. 102.5 had gone silent, so WSPB bought that tower and moved it to City Island to get the WSPB-FM antenna higher up. BTW, WYAK was one of the first, if not THE first, stereo station on the West Coast of Florida. The original 106.3 WSPB-FM antenna was on the original AM tower in the bay at the end of City Island. It was 3kw ERP, horizontal only at only 150 feet. It was mono and simulcast the AM. The only time they separated programming was when they had a baseball and football game at the same time. Football on FM, baseball on AM. When that happened, the FM was programmed out of the Production Control Room. We shunt fed the AM on the grounded tower and placed the FM antenna at the top. That increased the FM height by 100 feet. There were no skirts on the tower then, we just shunt fed it by running a wire, insulated off from the tower, up to the feed point about 1/4 wavelength up. We didn't have space for radials, so the ground system was thirty-six 20 ft copper pipes driven straight down into the water table. I know, I was 18 at the time and drove most of those rods in. The FCC gave us some grief on the ground system, but we finally convinced them it worked. So yes, there was an FM on that tower for many years.
