Albany Herald building), until 2015. It returned to its hometown in WSWG in Valdosta that serves Albany. WALB's original digital signal on UHF channel 17 started operating from the Doerun tower in 2001. In June 2002, WALB donated over 1,600 cans of newsfilm to The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia. The collection contains raw news footage from Albany and surrounding areas from 1961 to 1978, including coverage of the Albany Movement. WALB launched NBC Weather Plus in 2005 on a new second digital subchannel. Known as "WALB 24/7 Weather", the service gave continuous forecasts for up to thirty cities around Southwestern Georgia. After NBC Weather Plus shut down in December 2008, WALB-DT2 became part of This TV. Liberty merged with Raycom Media in 2005. Raycom already owned Fox affiliate WFXL, and could not keep both stations because Albany has only four full-power stations—not enough to legally permit a duopoly. Raycom opted to keep WALB and sell WFXL and eleven other stations to Barrington Broadcasting. On June 1, 2006, a military chopper traveling from Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah to Fort Rucker in Alabama for a training mission hit a guy wire connected to WFXL's tower resulting in a crash. While the tower remained standing and intact (other than the guy wire), the station was forced to temporarily cease its over-the-air signal although broadcasts on cable were not affected. If its tower collapsed, this could have also caused the tower of WALB to topple as both were only apart. As a result, Raycom (which at that time still operated WFXL while the sale to Barrington awaited FCC approval) acquired auxiliary transmitters and antennas for both WALB and WFXL which were installed at the tower at WALB's studios in Albany. On June 7, WFXL's tower was demolished but in doing so one of the tower's guy wires wrapped around one for WALB's tower as feared. As a result, WALB's tower collapsed in an incident shown on live television. Since both stations were already transmitting signals from the tower at the WALB studios, the two were still on-the-air although at low-power. Thirteen months later, WALB and WFXL's new tower in Doerun was completed and began broadcasting on July 3, 2007 at 11:35 p.m. It was announced on November 19, 2010 that WALB would begin airing ABC on its second digital subchannel scheduled to begin