City Lake Worth, Florida Affiliations Ion Television | Branding ION Television | |
Slogan Positively Entertaining Channels Digital: 36 (UHF)
Virtual: 67 (PSIP) Subchannels 67.1 Ion Television
67.2 Qubo
67.3 ION Life
67.4 Ion Shop
67.5 QVC
67.6 HSN | ||
WPXP-TV is the Ion Television affiliate for West Palm Beach, Florida, licensed to nearby Lake Worth. The station is owned and operated by West Palm Beach-based ION Media Networks, and operates a digital TV signal on channel 36. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WPXP's virtual channel as 67.
Its digital signal has a much greater broadcast range than its now-defunct channel 67 analog signal. The analog station was located within the western part of the city of West Palm Beach, and had a service contour that reached as far north as Port St. Lucie and as far south and Pompano Beach (immediately north of Fort Lauderdale). The digital station is west-southwest of Lake Worth, and its service area includes as far north as Okeechobee and Fort Pierce, and far south as Kendale Lakes, including all of Palm Beach, Broward, and Martin counties; and northeast Miami-Dade, eastern Hendry, and southern/central St. Lucie counties.
The first application for the station was made in 1984, and the WHBI callsign was assigned in June 1987 until the end of 1997. In January 1998, it finally went on-air after more than a decade of modified and expired construction permits, and took its present call letters upon joining the erstwhile Pax TV network. All applications prior to 2003 were by Hispanic Broadcasting, Inc., before becoming Paxson West Palm Beach Licanse, Inc. (a holding company, which is common in broadcasting), though there was no application listed to assign the station to another licensee.
Unlike sister station WPXM-TV in nearby Miami (considered a separate media market), WPXP signed off its analog signal on June 12, 2009 (WPXM opted to do so on the original transition date of February 17). Both stations carried Florida Marlins baseball games from 2002 to 2005. The two digital stations have a large overlap, with WPXP covering most of the land area and almost all of the population that the much lower-power WPXM does, except for Homestead, South Miami Heights, and North Key Largo.
The station is operated from ION Media Network's world headquarters in downtown West Palm Beach.
Analog-to-digital conversion
WPXP-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 67, 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 remained 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 67, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.