City Conroe, Texas Affiliations Ion Television | Branding Ion Television | |
Slogan Positively Entertaining Channels Digital: 32 (UHF)
Virtual: 49 (PSIP) Owner Ion Media Networks
(Ion Media Houston License, Inc.) | ||
KPXB-TV, virtual channel 49 (UHF digital channel 32), is an Ion Television owned-and-operated television station serving Houston, Texas, United States that is licensed to the suburb of Conroe. The station is owned by Ion Media Networks. KPXB maintains offices located adjacent to Sam Houston Parkway and I-45 on Houston's northwest side (near Aldine), and its transmitter is located in unincorporated northeastern Fort Bend County (near Missouri City).
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History
The station first signed on the air on June 16, 1989 as KTFH (not to be confused with present-day UniMás owned-and-operated station KFTH-DT, channel 67); mainly airing home shopping programming, before becoming an over-the-air affiliate of Spanish-language network Galavisión (which is primarily distributed through cable and satellite television) in November of that year. In 1990 to 2009, KBPX-LP (channel 33) signed on as low-powered translator, that mainly served to improve KPXB's signal coverage in southern portions of Houston since the full-power analog transmitter site was located in the far northern suburbs.
KTFH was sold to Paxson Communications (the forerunner to Ion Media Networks) in 1995. Paxson then dropped Galavisión and affiliated it with its Infomail Television Network (inTV) infomercial service on April 3, 1995; its call letters were later changed to KPXB in early 1998. KPXB, along with other Paxson-owned stations, became a charter station of Pax TV (later i: Independent Television and now Ion Television) when the network launched on August 31, 1998.
After the digital transition, KPXB moved its transmitter from east of Splendora to the Houston-area antenna farm near Missouri City. KBPX-LP was shut down on June 30, 2009, two weeks after the digital transition, due to loss of access to the tower site. However, since the main KPXB transmitter provides a signal comparable to the other Houston stations, the translator was redundant in any event. On November 22, 2010, KBPX-LP resumed operations on digital channel 46, as an affiliate of The Country Network.
Analog-to-digital conversion
KPXB-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 49, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition VHF channel 5 (it was later moved to UHF channel 32 due to signal issues common with low-band VHF digital channels), using PSIP to display KPXB-TV's virtual channel as 49 on digital television receivers.