Branding ION Television | ||
City Fayetteville, North Carolina Slogan Positively Entertaining Channels Digital: 36 (UHF)
Virtual: 62 (PSIP) Subchannels 62.1 Ion Television
62.2 qubo
62.3 ION Life
62.4 ION Shop
62.5 QVC Affiliations Ion Television (O&O; 1998–present) | ||
WFPX-TV is one of two Ion Television affiliates for the Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, USA, television market, licensed to nearby Fayetteville. The station is owned by ION Media Networks (the former Paxson Communications), and is a full-time satellite of WRPX-TV in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Its transmitter is located in Lumber Bridge, North Carolina. It transmits on UHF digital channel 36, and through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WFPX's virtual channel as 62.1.
Contents
History
Channel 62 signed on in 1985 as WFCT, an independent broadcaster owned by Fayetteville/Cumberland Telecasters. Attorneys Robinson and Katherine Everett of Durham, founders of WRDU-TV (now WRDC) in Durham, along with WJKA (now WSFX-TV) in Wilmington and WGGT (now WMYV) in Greensboro, were two of the principals in this company.
The station changed call letters to WFAY in 1993 and became a Fox affiliate in 1994; the affiliation came as part of a deal that also saw the Everetts switch their CBS affiliates, WJKA and KECY-TV in El Centro, California/Yuma, Arizona to Fox. Etven though WFAY was located in the same market as WLFL (a Fox affiliate at the time), it mainly focused on communities located south of Fayetteville that did not get a good signal from WLFL. Some of its non-network programming was also simulcast to the Raleigh-Durham area on WRAY-TV for a couple of years in the mid-1990s until it was acquired by the Shop at Home network.
WFAY later became WFPX and dropped Fox after being bought out by Paxson in 1998. Later that year, newly minted Fox station WFXB out of the Florence/Myrtle Beach market expanded its signal to cover areas formerly served by WFAY. It is worthy of note that WFPX's signal is not seen at all in the northern portion of the Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville market, but covers northern portions of the Florence-Myrtle Beach market, which did not have its own Ion affiliate until 2015, when WBTW added Ion on a digital subchannel following a deal made with Media General.
Analog-to-digital conversion
WFPX-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 62, at noon on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal continued to broadcasts on its pre-transition UHF channel 36. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 62, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition. In recent years, WFPX has been carried on cable in multiple areas within the Wilmington media market.