WWPX-TV

WWPX-TV (channel 60) is a television station licensed to Martinsburg, West Virginia, United States, broadcasting the Ion Television network to the northwestern portion of the Washington, D.C., television market.^[2] Owned and operated by Ion Media, the station maintains transmitter facilities on Blue Ridge Mountain east of Charles Town, West Virginia.

WWPX-TV operates as a full-time satellite of the main Ion station for the Washington area, Manassas, Virginia–licensed WPXW-TV (channel 66), whose offices are located in Fairfax Station, Virginia. WWPX covers areas of West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle, northern Virginia, central Maryland and south-central Pennsylvania that receive a marginal to non-existent over-the-air signal from WPXW, although there is significant overlap between the two stations' contours otherwise. WWPX is a straight simulcast of WPXW; on-air references to WWPX are limited to Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-mandated hourly station identifications during programming. Aside from the transmitter, WWPX does not maintain any physical presence locally in Martinsburg.

History[edit]

Channel 60 signed on October 1, 1991, as WYVN ("Your Valley News"), with studios located in a renovated barn on Discovery Place in Martinsburg. WYVN was the second Fox affiliate in West Virginia, behind Charleston's WVAH-TV (now a Catchy Comedy affiliate). Unusually for Fox stations in the network's early years, WYVN made a commitment from the beginning to local news and public affairs programming.^[3] However, owner Flying A Communications found itself in financial trouble due to the cost of the local news operation and poor ratings from competition with Washington, D.C.-based stations. Flying A Communications filed for bankruptcy in October 1992, and the station suspended newscasts in May 1993.^[4]

WYVN was forced off the air when Flying A went into receivership on September 17, 1993. A sale to WUSQ-FM owner Benchmark Communications, who would have converted the station to CBS affiliate WUSQ-TV, was worked out and approved by the station's bankruptcy trustee, but fell through at the last minute; the license was instead sold to Green River Broadcasting, who returned the station to air on September 24 while it worked out a financing plan.^[5][6] Having lost its Fox affiliation, WYVN soldiered on as an independent, and briefly attempted a return of local news from January through February 1994.^[7][8] The station remained unable to emerge from bankruptcy; the studio and equipment were sold to its creditors on April 1, 1994, and they locked out the staff and suspended broadcasting.^[6] Paxson Communications acquired the license out of bankruptcy for $1.9 million in late 1994.^[9]

The station returned again on September 1, 1996, as WSHE-TV, a Paxson station that aired the company's standard infomercial format, with religious programming in some dayparts. The change was made as a clean break with the troubled history of WYVN, but also to "park" a heritage call sign that Paxson had recently removed from one of its FM stations in Miami (now WMIB).^[10] The station changed its call letters to WWPX at the beginning of 1998 and became a charter member of Pax TV along with most of Paxson's other stations on August 31 of that year. It has remained with the network, later known as i: Independent Television and now known as Ion Television, ever since.

WWPX was originally a full affiliate of Pax. In 2002, it converted to a satellite of WPXW. The station could no longer afford its own staff of five master-control operators, and becoming a satellite allowed it to carry only the legal minimum of one manager and one engineer.^[11]

Technical information[edit]

Subchannels[edit]

The station's signal is multiplexed:

Analog-to-digital conversion[edit]

WWPX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 60, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition VHF channel 12, using virtual channel 60.^[14]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Official website