TFC Files Petition To Sell WRAF, Other Radio Properties

WRAF_logo_decalA broadcasting legacy at Toccoa Falls College is coming to a close.

An application has been filed with the Federal Communications Commission by TFC to sell its radio station group, including Toccoa Falls flagship station, WRAF, to a Lakeland, Florida based, non-commercial religious format operator.

Radio Training Network, operators of His Radio 89.3 in Greenville, is paying Toccoa Falls College $2.1 million in cash for WRAF; student-operated WTXR; a Belton, South Carolina station, WEPC; 2 FM repeater stations; and an AM station in Franklin, North Carolina.

The new operators are expected to repeat the contemporary Christian music format of their Greenville station, WLFJ, over WRAF and the other stations in the Toccoa Falls Radio Network.

WRAF dates back to 1980 when it went on the air as one of the first religious-formatted FM radio stations in the South, operating with 100,000 watts from a tower within view of the remnants of Kelly Barnes Lake Dam, which had burst in 1977, flooding the campus and taking the lives of 39 people, the worst man made disaster in the history of Stephens County.

The station’s call sign stands for the name of the college’s founder, Richard A. Forrest.

However, WRAF was not the first radio station for Toccoa Falls College.

In 1927, a church in the Tampa, Florida area gave the college a license for an AM station that took the call sign WTFI, for Toccoa Falls Institute.

That station, one of Georgia’s oldest, moved to Athens in the early 1930s and by the late 1930s was operating in Atlanta, where it is still on the air.