Vacation Channel to up power, coverage

A Branson-based television station is heading upward and reaching out to more area homes.
The Vacation Channel is raising the height of its tower at Miriam Woods in eastern Taney County and increasing the station’s wattage from 19,000 kilowatts to 150,000 kilowatts. The company received Federal Communications Commission approval for the extension in June 2002. Vacation Channel officials said the station should be broadcasting at the new levels by June.
“Right now our antenna is (at) about 180 feet on this tower. We’re going to move it up to 410 feet. It’s actually a 40-foot antenna,” said Tim Dennis, station manager.
The station’s 24-hour programming emphasizes visitor information such as Branson shows, shopping, activities, traffic routes, restaurants and local programming such as high school sports.
Extending the tower will increase the station’s range, which currently covers Taney and Stone counties. The challenge is for the signal to reach into the hills and valleys of the Ozarks.
“One of our main goals is to make sure we are, without a doubt, completely saturating and penetrating the Taney and Stone county areas that we have served for many years,” said Stan Bess, vice president and general sales manager, who founded the station in 1989 with Scott Earls, general manager.
“But it will also afford us the opportunity to stretch our boundaries a little bit. We’re very excited and looking forward to being able to cover Christian County – Nixa and Ozark – and we believe that that will be an added benefit to our existing advertisers, but we hope that it will allow us to increase our advertising base as well.”
Advertisers mostly consist of theaters, attractions, restaurants and retailers, including the Jim Stafford Theatre, Skaggs Community Health Center, Saddlebrooke and Silver Dollar City.
Dennis estimates the project cost at around $200,000, compared to building a new tower for about $500,000. Dennis declined to share the name of the contractor working on the tower, but said that the company is from outside of the Branson area.
The decision to upgrade, Dennis said, was a progression of the area’s growth.
“As part of the reach of Branson expanded and the tourism industry reached further out into the Tri-Lakes area, we knew we needed to get information out to those visitors that were elsewhere in the area besides Branson so we would be a better value to our customers,” he said.
Bess declined to disclose company revenues but said that there has been an approximately 14 percent increase in gross revenues in the last year and a half.
Dennis said that the station has about 30 employees, and 14 are full-time. Employment fluctuates with the seasons.
A recent survey indicated that the station is viewed by almost 50 percent of overnight visitors to the area. The Vacation Channel commissioned the Atlanta-based Mont-gomery Consulting viewership study in the fall.
“To the normal person that number may not sound good, but you have to remember when you look at a normal TV station and people tuning in, if they could get anywhere near that number of viewers at a given time, it would be a phenomenal rating,” Dennis said.