WTGS (channel 28) is a television station licensed to Hardeeville, South Carolina, United States, serving as the Fox affiliate for the Savannah, Georgia, area. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, WTGS maintains transmitter facilities on Fort Argyle Road/SR 204 in western unincorporated Chatham County, Georgia, while its studios are located in the Savannah Morning News building on Chatham Parkway in Savannah. WTGS went on the air in 1985 as the first independent television station for Savannah and the southern Lowcountry and the lone commercial television station in southeastern South Carolina. Originally built by a Florida company, a change in federal regulations on cable carriage that took effect weeks before starting up nearly carried the station to the brink of bankruptcy. Between 1996 and 2014, operations of WTGS were related to those of WJCL (channel 22), Savannah's ABC affiliate, by a series of operating agreements. During much of this period, WJCL produced local newscasts for air on WTGS. However, the two stations were split in 2014 when owner LIN Media and its affiliates opted to divest WJCL and WTGS to separate entities in order to complete a merger. The two stations continue to share office space, though Sinclair now handles news production itself for WTGS. History Early years, cable disputes, and near-bankruptcy (19851996) Business and Minority Coalition Broadcasters, Inc., a consortium of six investors from Charleston, filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to build a new television station on channel 28 in Hardeeville ( from the allocation city of Savannah, the maximum distance permitted), which would transmit from a site on St. Helena Island and reach audiences from Kiawah Island in the northeast to Savannah in the southwest. The FCC approved the license on November 17, 1981, and it took the call sign WTGS, with a planned start date in September 1982. The WTGS construction permit was purchased in 1983 by American Communications and Television (AC&T), a company based in Gainesville, Florida. This cable and communications firm was making an incursion into new full-power and low-power independent stations across the country. It was another two years before movement began in earnest to build the station, whose founding general manager and 20% owner, John Bailie, had previously built two other Southern independents: WPTY in Memphis and WAWS-TV in Jacksonville. Planned programming included movies and children's programming in the morning and afternoon, with few commercial interruptions; Bailie stated that WTGS was