WJHL-TV (channel 11) is a television station licensed to Johnson City, Tennessee, United States, serving the Tri-Cities area as an affiliate of CBS and ABC. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group, and maintains studios on East Main Street in downtown Johnson City; its transmitter is located on Holston Mountain in the Cherokee National Forest. History WJHL-TV began broadcasting on October 26, 1953. It was owned by Hanes Lancaster, Sr. his son Hanes, Jr. and Jesse W. "Jay" Birdwell along with WJHL radio (910 AM, now WJCW; and FM 101.5, now WQUT). The call letters stood for John H. Lancaster, Hanes, Sr.'s father and Hanes, Jr.'s grandfather, who had founded the AM station in 1938. Hanes, Jr., who was the radio station's sales manager, was intrigued by the potential of television, and pushed hard for building a television counterpart to WJHL radio. Hanes, Sr. was skeptical, but Hanes, Jr. lined up enough potential investors to persuade his father to take the project under his wing. The Lancaster-Birdwell interests applied for a license in 1948, only to be derailed by the nationwide license freeze that had been imposed a few months earlier. After a four-and-a-half year wait, they were granted a license in January 1953. In the summer of 1953, WJHL-TV was on track to be the first television station to sign on in East Tennessee, projecting to begin operations on October 17. At the time, the station's original transmission tower was being constructed on Tannery Knob in downtown Johnson City. With just a few weeks before sign-on, the guy wires snapped, sending the tower and its antenna crashing to the ground, falling just from the transmission equipment. Despite the damage, only two people were injured. This enabled WROL-TV in Knoxville (now WATE-TV) to beat WJHL-TV to the air by almost a month. Since many advertisers and banks were already skeptical about television's viability (the tower crash did not help), the Lancasters had to scramble for funding. They were able to get the station on the air more than a week later, but had to side-mount a much smaller replacement antenna on a wooden power pole the Johnson City Power Board installed at the last minute. In 1955, Birdwell sold his interests in WJHL-AM-FM-TV, ending his involvement in broadcasting. Birdwell had already sold WBIR in Knoxville (now WIFA) eleven years earlier to a Cincinnati-based consortium, which retained the call letters