Branding ION Television | ||
Slogan Positively Entertaining Channels Digital: 12 (VHF)
Virtual: 60 (PSIP) Subchannels 60.1 Ion Television
60.2 Qubo
60.3 ION Life
60.4 Ion Shop
60.5 QVC
60.6 HSN Affiliations Ion Television (O&O; 1998–present) Owner Ion Media Networks, Inc.
(Ion Media Martinsburg License, Inc.) | ||
WWPX-TV is the Ion Television (formerly PAX and i) affiliate licensed to Martinsburg, West Virginia, United States and serving the northwestern portion of the Washington, D.C. television market. The station is owned by ION Media Networks, and broadcasts its digital signal on VHF channel 12, displayed as virtual channel 60. It is currently a relay of the main Ion affiliate for the Washington area, WPXW-TV.
Contents
History
Channel 60 signed on in 1991 as WYVN, a Fox affiliate. A news department was quickly set up, and offered more news than other stations in the area. However, Flying A Communications, the owner, found itself in financial trouble, due to this local news commitment and relatively poor ratings (partially caused by its location on cable, which was higher than other stations), leading to the station shutting down two years later, in 1993, after a sale to Benchmark Communications (who would have converted the station to a CBS affiliate for Winchester, Virginia and Hagerstown, Maryland under the WUSQ-TV callsign) fell through. A few months later, WYVN returned as an independent station, owned by Green River. The station tried to restore some local programming (including the newscast and a new talk show hosted by Gay Dawson), but further financial trouble caused this era to also end up being short-lived, abruptly ending in 1994.
The station returned again on September 1, 1996 as WSHE-TV, a Paxson Communications station that aired the company's standard infomercial format, with religious programming in some dayparts. The station changed its call letters to WWPX at the beginning of 1998, and became a charter member of Pax TV along with most of Paxson's other stations on August 31st of that year. It has remained with the network, later known as i and now known as Ion Television, ever since. Throughout that time, it has been a full-time satellite of WPXW.
Digital television
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
Analog-to-digital conversion
WWPX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 60, 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 VHF channel 12. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 60, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.