WHAG, the Hagerstown, MD, NBC affiliate gave its viewers a good news bad news scenario to start off the week. The good news? The station started broadcasting in HD on Monday morning. The bad news? If you watch the station over the air, you haven’t been able to see it.
WHAG general manager Hugh Breslin told TVSpy the station transmitter went down around 6:30 a.m. on Sunday. “Our engineers have been working on it and hope to have it repaired as soon as possible. Although we regret any inconvenience to any of our viewers, thankfully, most homes in our marketplace are unaffected.”
Viewers have taken to complaining about the outage on the station’s facebook page. The comments take aim at both the outage and what they see as the lack of information about what’s being done about it. One viewer wrote, “So what is the status of the transmitter problem. It has now been 72 hours with Little or NO information. Updating the status once a day with the same “we’re working on it” is frustrating. Your [sic] in the communications business so communicate.”
Breslin told TVSPy, “We believe we are communicating with our viewers appropriately given this circumstance.”
Yesterday, the station posted an update on its facebook page, “ATTENTION: There is currently still an issue with our transmitter that is preventing the transmission of our over the air signal. We have engineers working on that outage. This has nothing to do with our HD transition and is an unfortunate coincidence. When the problem is fixed you will be able to receive WHAG as you normally have! Thanks for sticking with us! We hope so have this issue resolved as soon as possible.”
The station started converting to High Def in August. Click here to view a video about the change.