KWDK (channel 56) is a

religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the eart ...

licensed to

Tacoma, Washington Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Pa ...

, United States, broadcasting the

Daystar Television Network The Daystar Television Network (commonly referred to as Daystar Television, often shortened to Daystar) is an American evangelical Christian-based religious television network owned by the Word of God Fellowship, founded by Marcus Lamb in 1993. ...

to the

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

area. The station is

owned and operated In the broadcasting industry, an owned-and-operated station (frequently abbreviated as an O&O) usually refers to a television or radio station owned by the network with which it is associated. This distinguishes such a station from an affiliate ...

by Community Television Educators, Inc., a subsidiary of Daystar parent company Word of God Fellowship. KWDK's transmitter is located on West Tiger Mountain near

Issaquah Issaquah ( ) is a city in King County, Washington, United States. The population was 40,051 at the 2020 census. Located in a valley and bisected by Interstate 90, the city is bordered by the Sammamish Plateau to the north and the " Issaquah Al ...

History

On July 17, 1992, the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...

(FCC) issued a construction permit for channel 56 and call letters KWDK, to Christopher J. Racine. The license of the unbuilt station was sold to Puget Sound Educational TV, Inc. on October 6, 1999. KWDK signed on the air September 6, 2000, broadcasting the Daystar network. KWDK was not the first station to broadcast on channel 56 in Tacoma. The Clover Park School District used the allocation to broadcast from Lakewood as public television station

KPEC-TV KPEC-TV, UHF analog channel 56, was an educational television station licensed to Lakewood Center, Washington, United States. Owned by the Clover Park School District and operated in association with other nearby school systems, it was one of t ...

from April 1960 to January 1976. It was effectively replaced when the school board purchased the transmitter facility and license of KTVW, a commercial station on VHF channel 13 in Tacoma, and moved its operation there as

KCPQ KCPQ (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Tacoma, Washington, United States, broadcasting the Fox network to the Seattle area. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside MyNetworkTV outlet ...

in January 1976, shuttering the less powerful channel 56. The school board then sold the station in 1980, at which time it reverted to private commercial broadcasting. On April 22, 2005, KWDK filed an application with the FCC for authorization to cease analog broadcasting and surrender its license for channel 56 prior to the end of the digital TV transition period, and thereafter operate KWDK-DT as a single channel, digital-only television station on channel 42. The FCC granted this authorization on July 20, 2005. KWDK apparently ceased analog broadcasting on channel 56 sometime in April 2006. In August 2006, it was verified to be broadcasting on digital channel 42, making KWDK-DT the first digital-only broadcaster in the Seattle–Tacoma market, three years before all analog signals on full power TV stations were discontinued.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's digital signal is

multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...

Analog-to-digital conversion

KWDK shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 56, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated from analog to digital television.List of Digital Full-Power Stations
The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 42, using

PSIP The Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) is the MPEG (a video and audio industry group) and privately defined program-specific information originally defined by General Instrument for the DigiCipher 2 system and later extended for the AT ...

to display KWDK's

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...

as 56 on digital television receivers, which was among the high band UHF channels (52–69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.

References

WDK Television channels and stations established in 2000 2000 establishments in Washington (state) Daystar (TV network) affiliates {{Washington-tv-station-stub