Affiliations TCT | First air date March 5, 1984 | |
Call letters' meaning LXI = Roman numeral 61 (former analog channel) | ||
WLXI, UHF digital channel 43, is a TCT owned-and-operated television station serving Winston-Salem, High Point and its city of license Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. The station is owned by Tri-State Christian Television. WLXI maintains studios and office facilities located on Patterson Street in Greensboro, and its transmitter is located near Randleman Lake in Randleman.
Contents
History
The station first signed on the air on March 5, 1984, originally broadcasting on UHF channel 61. It operated as a general entertainment independent station running cartoons, movies, drama series, westerns, music videos and classic sitcoms. Gradually it increased the amount of music videos on its schedule and by the fall of 1985, the station broadcast music videos for the entire broadcast day.
In early 1986, WLXI was sold to the Trinity Broadcasting Network and converted into an owned-and-operated station of the network, replacing secular entertainment programs with religious programming from TBN. TBN often purchased over-the-air stations in order to achieve must-carry status on cable providers, even though TBN stations air very limited local programming. In 1991, the station was sold to Tri-State Christian Television. In April 2007, TCT pulled TBN programming from its stations in favor of programming supplied by the company.
From 1993 to 2009, WLXI's signal was relayed on low-power translator station W18BG (channel 18, now WMDV-LD) in Danville, Virginia. In June 2009, that station was sold to the Star News Corporation (owners of WGSR-LD in that market) and stopped rebroadcasting WLXI's programming.
Analog-to-digital conversion
WLXI shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009, as part of the FCC-mandated transition to digital television for full-power stations. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 61, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to its former UHF analog channel 43. Shortly after conversing to digital, WLXI opted to use of its physical digital channel 43 as its virtual channel, instead of using its former UHF analog channel 61 (as one of a handful of television stations that chose to use a PSIP channel differing from its pre-transition analog allocation).
Out-of-market cable carriage
In recent years, WLXI has been carried on cable providers in areas within the Raleigh television market.