WWPX-TV is an Ion Television owned-and-operated television station licensed to Martinsburg, West Virginia, United States, and serving the northwestern portion of the Washington, D.C. television market. Owned by Ion Media Networks, it broadcasts a high definition digital signal on VHF channel 12 (or virtual channel 60 via PSIP) from a transmitter on Boyds Gap west of Martinsburg. It is currently a relay of the main Ion station for the Washington area, Manassas, Virginia-licensed WPXW-TV (channel 66).
History
Channel 60 signed on in 1991 as WYVN, a Fox affiliate, with studios located on Discovery Road in Martinsburg. 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). In addition to this, the station's signal would go back and forth between black and white and color; Fox itself was once appalled by the sighting of the station running The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Beauty Queen" in black and white; management responded by saying "we don't even have an engineer." This led 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 31 of that year. It has remained with the network, later known as i: Independent Television and now known as Ion Television, ever since.
WWPX was originally a full affiliate of Pax. In 2002, it converted to a satellite of WPXW. The station could no longer afford its own staff of five master-control operators, and becoming a satellite allowed it to carry only the legal minimum of one manager and one engineer.
| TV stations in West Virginia |
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| WLPX, Charleston WWPX, Martinsburg |
| TV stations in Metropolitan Washington, D.C. |
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| WRC 4 (NBC) WTTG 5 (Fox) WJLA 7 (ABC) WUSA 9 (CBS) WDCO-CD 10 (JTV) WFDC 14 (UNI) WDCA 20 (MNTV) WMPT 22 (PBS) WDDN-LD 23 (Daystar) WDVM 25 (Ind) WETA 26 (PBS) WRZB-LD 31 (Escape) WWPB 31 (PBS) WHUT 32 (PBS) WZDC-CD 44 (TLM) WMDO-CD 47 (UMas) WWTD-LD 49 (MBCA) WDCW 50 (CW) WWPX 60 (Ion) WFPT 62 (PBS) WPXW 66 (Ion) WJAL 68 (SBN) |