Branding WLRN Call letters' meaning We LeaRN | Affiliations .1: PBS | |
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Channels Digital: 20 (UHF)
Virtual: 17 (PSIP) Owner Miami-Dade County Public Schools
(The School Board of Miami-Dade County, Florida) First air date September 7, 1962; 54 years ago (1962-09-07) | ||
WLRN-TV, virtual channel 17 (UHF digital channel 20), is a PBS member television station located in Miami, Florida, United States. The station is owned by the Miami-Dade County Public Schools district, alongside NPR member radio station WLRN-FM (91.3). WLRN maintains studio facilities located on Northeast 15th Street and Northeast 1st Avenue in Miami, and its transmitter is located at McTyre Park in Miami Gardens. WLRN operates twenty closed-circuit educational channels for use by public schools within Miami-Dade County.
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History
Prior to the station's sign-on, the UHF channel 17 allocation in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale market was occupied by ABC affiliate WITV. It lost the ABC affiliation to newly signed-on WPST-TV (channel 10, now WPLG) in August 1957, and went off the air soon afterward.
WLRN-TV first signed on the air on September 7, 1962 as WSEC-TV; it was the second non-commercial educational television station in the market. Operating as a member station of National Educational Television (NET), WSEC was originally owned by the Dade County School Board, which had persuaded the Federal Communications Commission to reallocate the channel 17 license for non-commercial use.
At the time, the Dade County School Board was part-owner of the VHF channel 2 allocation in the market as part of a shared-time agreement with Community Television Foundation of South Florida, owners of WPBT. Under the original arrangement, the School Board operated the channel 2 frequency for five hours each day as WTHS-TV, carrying instructional television during the daytime hours, while the Community Television Foundation would take over the channel for two hours each evening to broadcast WPBT. Community Television Foundation had already begun increasing WPBT's operating hours, a process that accelerated with WSEC's sign-on. The 1970 formation of PBS brought a further increase in WPBT's broadcasting hours. By the late 1970s, PBS had grown enough that the split-time arrangement no longer made sense for a market of Miami/Fort Lauderdale's size. In 1979, the Dade County School Board returned the WTHS license to the FCC, while WPBT took over channel 2 full-time. Most of WTHS' educational programming moved to WSEC, which changed its call letters to the current WLRN-TV, to match its sister public radio station. Gradually, WLRN-TV evolved into a secondary PBS station for South Florida, alongside WPBT.
Analog-to-digital conversion
WLRN-TV terminated its analog signal, on UHF channel 17, 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 UHF channel 20. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WLRN-TV's virtual channel as 17.