Throughout its entire run as WKYH, the station's on-air look was very primitive, even by small-market standards. Much of its equipment had been bought as surplus from other stations, and was usually in a poor state of repair after as much as two decades of use. This was especially true of the transmitter; by the early 1980s the station's signal had deteriorated to the point of unacceptability. A video clip of the station's nightly sign-off from 1985 provided evidence of the shaky signal quality. Matters weren't helped by the fact that the station's coverage area is very mountainous; UHF stations do not get much penetration in rugged terrain even under the best conditions. WKYH did not even have a character generator for its newscasts. The station was unable to get a network feed, due to NBC's belief that it was not worth the trouble and cost, forcing station engineers to rely on microwave links from WLEX-TV in Lexington and WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia (from the Tri-Cities market) for network programming. WCYB was used as a backup in case WLEX preempted an NBC show to show local programming. Whenever the microwave system failed, WKYH was forced to switch to and from WLEX or WCYB's signal, usually with less-than-satisfactory results. When this happened, WKYH sometimes aired WLEX or WCYB's commercials or station IDs when it was unable to cover them up in time. As such, the station never thrived, even when cable arrived in the area in the early 1980s, and this situation allowed, in a strange way, WKYH to relate to NBC during the period when that network was presided over by Fred Silverman.