itself. That market was one of the last on the East Coast without its own NBC affiliate. It was carried on cable as far south as Georgetown, South Carolina. Well into the 1990s, it identified as "Wilmington/Myrtle Beach" to acknowledge its viewership on the Grand Strand. However, WECT's signal was somewhat weak on the North Carolina side of the market, such as Laurinburg. Atlantic Telecasting sold the station to the News-Press & Gazette Company in 1986. That company then sold its entire station group to the first incarnation of New Vision Television in 1993. New Vision turned around and sold its entire group to Ellis Communications in 1995. Ellis was folded into Raycom Media in 1997. In 2006, Raycom bought out the Liberty Corporation, owner of WWAY. However, FCC duopoly rules forced Raycom to spin off WWAY to Morris Multimedia as a condition of the Raycom–Liberty merger. On May 8, 2008, the FCC announced that five stations in Wilmington (including WECT) had agreed to voluntarily cease analog broadcasting on September 8 five months ahead of the February 17, 2009, tentative date for television stations to complete the analog-to-digital transition. The market was used by the FCC as a pre-transition test market. After the digital transition, WGNI radio agreed to air emergency weather information from WECT. Previously, because channel 6 is adjacent to the FM band, its broadcasts could be heard on FM 87.7. WECT's coverage has been reduced as a result of the digital transition which left the station on UHF. The move of the station's transmitter by from south of White Lake to Winnabow left Fayetteville viewers unable to watch the station over the air. The station's former transmitter was located in Bladen County, approximately halfway between Wilmington and Fayetteville. While Myrtle Beach itself is just outside the fringe area for the digital signal, North Myrtle Beach is just inside it. The southern and western portions of the Florence–Myrtle Beach market were served by another Raycom station, WIS in Columbia. On August 8, 2008, Raycom signed-on WMBF-TV, a new digital-only NBC affiliate in Myrtle Beach covering the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as part of its first network programming. Due to FCC regulations, WECT disappeared from most cable systems in the Florence/Myrtle Beach market when WMBF signed on. For longtime viewers, this was controversial as this station had been on cable systems in Laurinburg and Lumberton for decades. On