WWDP

WWDP
Norwell/Boston, Massachusetts
United States
City Norwell, Massachusetts
Channels Digital: 10 (VHF)
Virtual: 46 (PSIP)
Affiliations
Owner EVINE Live, Inc.
First air date December 6, 1986 (1986-12-06)
Call letters' meaning Devon Paxson Media (former owner)
Former callsigns
  • WRYT (1986–1988)
  • WHRC (1988–1998)
  • WBPX (1998–1999)
Former channel number(s)
  • Analog:
  • 46 (UHF, 1986–2009)
Former affiliations
Transmitter power 11.9 kW
Height 142 m
Facility ID 23671
Transmitter coordinates 42°0′38″N 71°2′40″W / 42.01056°N 71.04444°W / 42.01056; -71.04444
Licensing authority FCC
Public license information: Profile
CDBS

WWDP, virtual channel 46 (VHF digital channel 10), is an Evine-affiliated television station serving Boston, Massachusetts, United States that is licensed to Norwell. The station broadcasts on digital VHF channel 10. airs home shopping programs from, and is owned by EVINE Live, Inc. WWDP maintains studios on Bert Drive in West Bridgewater, and its transmitter is located off Pleasant Street in West Bridgewater.

History

The station first signed on the air on December 6, 1986 as WRYT, operating as an independent station from a bare-bones facility in Hanover. It operated from a tiny 300-foot (91 m) tower originally designed for use as a translator. It broadcast at only 6,000 watts – the minimum transmitter power for a full-power station. All of the equipment – two tape decks, a mixer, a primitive character generator, a satellite receiver and an Emergency Broadcast System unit – was located in an old video store bathroom.

The station changed its callsign to WHRC on February 4, 1988. Two months later, it began broadcasting from a considerably improved broadcast facility in Brockton. Its 952,000-watt effective radiated power gave it fairly decent coverage of the southern fringe of Greater Boston, and it had also managed to get carriage on cable throughout the market. However, the antenna was somewhat heavier than normal, and the owners feared that the tower could not handle the weight of ice buildup should winter weather hit the area. As a result, the station was forced to go off the air in November while a new site was found.

In January 1989, WHRC returned to the air from a transmitter in Foxborough, with considerably reduced power (at 501,000 watts). However, the site was not wired for three-phase power, as is usually the case with television transmitters. WHRC was forced to make do with diesel power, which was totally inadequate for a television transmitter. Two of the transmitter's three diesel generators had failed by the spring of 1989, leaving WHRC unable to broadcast in color for half of the time. The station had never been on solid financial ground, and the technical problems only hampered matters further.

By June, the owner, a California resident, was going through a divorce, which complicated his efforts to keep the station going. He stopped paying syndication distributors, the diesel fuel supplier and other creditors, and the employees' paychecks started to bounce. The station was put on the market, but there were no credible buyers. Finally, in September, the diesel fuel supplier refused to deliver any more fuel to power the transmitter facility. As a result, the station abruptly went off the air at 1:13 p.m. on September 19, 1989, when the diesel generator used up the last remaining bit of fuel. At the time, many of the employees had not been paid for eight weeks.

Paxson Communications bought the WHRC license in December 1996, and returned channel 46 to the air as an affiliate of the company's all-infomercial inTV network. On January 13, 1998, the station changed its call letters to WBPX, in anticipation of the pending launch of Pax TV (now Ion Television). It also added a (short-lived) local newscast.[1] The station became a charter owned-and-operated station of Pax when the network launched on August 31 of that year.

In 1999, the WBPX callsign and Pax affiliation were transferred over to WABU (channel 68), an independent station that Paxson had recently acquired. Concurrently, Paxson Communications sold channel 46 to DP Media (named for Devon Paxson, son of Pax TV founder Lowell "Bud" Paxson), which changed the station's callsign to WWDP (standing for DP Media) and rejoined inTV.[2] After just one year with that format, ZGS Communications took over the operations of WWDP under a local marketing agreement,[3] running it as a full-powered repeater of Telemundo affiliate WTMU-LP.

On July 1, 2002, WWDP dropped the WTMU simulcast,[4] and affiliated with home shopping channel America's Collectibles Network.[5] However, a few months later, WNEU (channel 60) was purchased by NBC to convert it into a full-power satellite of WTMU. ValueVision Media bought WWDP in 2003 and switched its affiliation to ShopNBC (now EVINE Live, which had previously been carried on WNEU).[6] WWDP's EVINE Live schedule is only interrupted by three hours of E/I programming that the Federal Communications Commission requires full-power stations to air on a weekly basis.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

Channel Video Aspect PSIP Short Name Programming[7]
46.1 1080i 16:9 WWDP-DT Main WWDP programming / EVINE
46.2 480i 4:3 WWDP-DT

Analog-to-digital conversion

In December 2008, WWDP received authorization by the FCC to temporarily shut down its digital signal, in order to allow the station to install a new antenna for the transmitter. Although the mandated date for full-power television stations to convert to digital-only broadcasts was postponed from February 17, 2009 to June 12, WWDP was able to activate its digital signal on February 17 as Providence, Rhode Island-based WJAR discontinued its analog signal on channel 10 on the original transition date. WWDP shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 46, in April 2009. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 52, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to VHF channel 10.[8] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 46.

References

  1. ↑ Fybush, Scott (1998-01-08). "Ian Taylor, RIP". North East RadioWatch. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
  2. ↑ Fybush, Scott (1999-06-25). "CRTC Acts on Montreal Frequencies". North East RadioWatch. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
  3. ↑ Trigoboff, Dan (2001-11-19). "Station Break". Broadcasting & Cable. Retrieved 2007-10-26.
  4. ↑ Fybush, Scott (2002-07-08). "WMTW Clears Out". North East RadioWatch. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
  5. ↑ Fybush, Scott (2002-07-15). "Clear Channel Faces Hearings on Augusta Purchase". North East RadioWatch. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
  6. ↑ "ValueVision to acquire Boston's WWDP television station". Boston Business Journal. 2003-01-13. Retrieved 2007-10-26.
  7. ↑ RabbitEars TV Query for WWDP
  8. ↑ "DTV Tentative Channel Designations for the First and Second Rounds" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-03-24.

See also

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