Sammi Brie, I've completed the review and the article is almost a good article. There are a couple small issues, mostly relating to completeness of certain episodes in "VHF competitors arrive" which should be fixed before I can promote it. For the time being I'm putting this nomination on hold, also note that the points 1 and 7 in the comments section are more suggestions than issues and aren't necessary for the good article criteria. Good work on the article in general! Tayi ArajakateTalk14:16, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Tayi Arajakate, I've addressed most of these issues. This is a bit inside baseball-y of a topic, but a lot of stations failed for this basic reason, and I've piled up DYKs (and hopefully soon a GA) on them like cordwood over the years to the tune of about 30. (WNAO-TV lasted longer than most!) Quick summary: the original band plan for TV in the US contemplated 12 channels, 2 to 13. Demand was so overwhelming there was a four-year freeze on new TV applications (1948–1952) while the FCC worked out a solution, which was the UHF band with 70 extra channels (14 to 83). However, while people generally rated picture quality well, the coverage area was less for a UHF of the time, especially in rugged terrain. The biggest omission was that there was no requirement for new TV sets to be made to receive the new UHF channels. This put a serious damper on the ability of UHFs, in a market with at least one VHF station, to attract advertisers and viewers and swept dozens of them to their financial doom. As it turns out, WRAL and WTVD (the two VHF stations in this particular area) became very strong stations, and even when the technical issues were less, there were problems, and to this day the "third" station in the market is just that, third-rated. (You'll see this if you read WRDC and WNCN, which are both intended for GAN once a few more of my current nominations get taken up.) Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 18:01, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sammi Brie, thanks for the explaination, that was helpful. I have checked the article again and the issues are resolved except the line "... created increasing concern at Sir Walter as to WNAO-TV's continued viability, given the unequal economic environment faced by UHF stations in the presence of stronger VHF; at the time, not all television sets could tune UHF channels" needs a source since it doesn't appear to be verifiable from the in-line citation unless I'm missing something. Once this is fixed I'll promote it to GA status, sorry for making you wait this long. Tayi ArajakateTalk12:45, 5 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
"... though it aired programming from all four networks." Perhaps the other three could be mentioned?
Sir Walter's petition if accepted would have eliminated any intermixing between commercial UHF and VHF channels seems to be a key point which is not mentioned.
"... created increasing concern at Sir Walter." Why?
The points presented by WPTF in its protestation could be better summarised instead of a specific one being mentioned, and I would suggest not using words like "rebutted". The FCC's final decision should be mentioned as well, otherwise the paragraph appears incomplete.
"That year, the company entered into discussions with the University of North Carolina..." How did it conclude?
"For the next five years, Southern pursued channel 8; when it won the construction permit for what became WGHP in October 1962—after an initial decision the year before favored a competing application from the owners of WKIX radio—the WNAO-TV and WTOB-TV permits were surrendered for cancellation as a condition of the award." The sentence reads quite convoluted, I would suggest breaking it up into two or three sentences.
Not much else, though I found the wording of the article in general a bit of technical, requiring some understanding of the American broadcast industry and FCC processes to be able to understand it. Could provide some minor elaborations in text and/or simplify the wording but it's not a big issue so I'll leave that up to you on whether and how you want to fix it.
Pass