WGBX-TV (channel 44), branded on-air as GBH 44 since 2020, is the secondary

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

member Member may refer to: * Military jury, referred to as "Members" in military jargon * Element (mathematics), an object that belongs to a mathematical set * In object-oriented programming, a member of a class ** Field (computer science), entries in ...

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 earth ...

in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Owned by the

WGBH Educational Foundation The WGBH Educational Foundation (also known as GBH since August 2020) is an American public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts. Established in 1951, it holds the licenses to all of the PBS member stations in Massachusetts, and op ...

, it is

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to Boston's primary PBS member station and company

flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the fi ...

WGBH-TV WGBH-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's sec ...

(channel 2),

Springfield, Massachusetts Springfield is a city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, and the seat of Hampden County. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers: the western Westfield River, the ...

-based PBS member

WGBY-TV WGBY-TV (channel 57) is a PBS member television station in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States. Owned by the Boston-based WGBH Educational Foundation, it is a sister station to that organization's flagship and namesake, WGBH-TV (channel ...

(channel 57, operated by

New England Public Media New England Public Media is a non-profit organization that operates the public broadcasting outlets in Western Massachusetts, including the Springfield area. It operates the region's NPR member, Amherst-licensed WFCR (New England Public Radio) a ...

), Class A

Biz TV Biz Television (commonly referred to as BizTV) is an American national television broadcast network owned by Center Post Media, which also owns Youtoo America, and BizTV's sister radio outlet, BizTalkRadio. The channel features programming devot ...

affiliate

WFXZ-CD WFXZ-CD (channel 24) is a Class A BizTV- affiliated television station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The station is owned by the WGBH Educational Foundation. WFXZ-CD's studios are located in Woburn. Under a channel sharin ...

(channel 24) and

public radio Public broadcasting involves radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing ...

stations

WGBH WGBH may refer to: * WGBH Educational Foundation, based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States ** WGBH (FM), a public radio station at Boston, Massachusetts on 89.7 MHz owned by the WGBH Educational Foundation ** WGBH-TV WGBH-TV (channel 2), ...

(89.7 FM) and

WCRB WCRB (99.5 FM) is a non-commercial radio station licensed to Lowell, Massachusetts, which serves the Greater Boston area. It broadcasts classical music. Its studios are located in Brighton, and its transmitter is located west of Andover. WCRB wa ...

(99.5 FM) in the Boston area, and

WCAI WCAI (90.1 FM) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, WNAN (91.1 FM) in Nantucket, and WZAI (94.3 FM) in Brewster, are National Public Radio member radio stations serving the Cape Cod and Islands area of southeast Massachusetts. They broadcast primarily ...

radio (and satellites WZAI and WNAN) on

Cape Cod Cape Cod is a peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean from the southeastern corner of mainland Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. Its historic, maritime character and ample beaches attract heavy tourism during the summer mont ...

. WGBX-TV, WGBH-TV and the WGBH and WCRB radio stations share studios on Guest Street in northwest Boston's

Brighton Brighton () is a seaside resort and one of the two main areas of the City of Brighton and Hove in the county of East Sussex, England. It is located south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze A ...

neighborhood; WGBX-TV's transmitter is located on Cedar Street (southwest of

I-95 Interstate 95 (I-95) is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the East Coast of the United States, running from US Route 1 (US 1) in Miami, Florida, to the Houlton–Woodstock Border Crossing between Maine and the Canadia ...

/ MA 128) in

Needham, Massachusetts Needham ( ) is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. A suburb of Boston, its population was 32,091 at the 2020 U.S. Census. It is home of Olin College. History Early settlement Needham was first settled in 1680 with the purchase of a ...

, which is shared with

WBZ-TV WBZ-TV (channel 4) is a television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, airing programming from the CBS network. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division alongside independent station WSBK-TV (channe ...

WCVB-TV WCVB-TV (channel 5) is a television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Hearst Television. The station's studios are located on TV Place (off Gould Street near the I-95/ MA 128/Highland Avenue ...

WBTS-CD WBTS-CD (channel 15) is a Class A television station licensed to Nashua, New Hampshire, United States, broadcasting NBC programming to the Boston area. It is owned and operated by the network's NBC Owned Television Stations division alongside ...

(which itself shares spectrum with WGBX) and

WSBK-TV WSBK-TV (channel 38) is an independent television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is owned by the CBS News and Stations group alongside CBS owned-and-operated station WBZ-TV (channel 4). Both stations share studios on So ...

. The X in WGBX's

callsign In broadcasting and radio communications, a call sign (also known as a call name or call letters—and historically as a call signal—or abbreviated as a call) is a unique identifier for a transmitter station. A call sign can be formally assigne ...

stands for "experimental", as WGBX (more primarily in the 1970s) was home to programming that was given a trial run on the lower-rated UHF signal before possibly moving onto the more-established WGBH-TV. Such Eastern Educational Network imports from the

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as ''

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'' were seen first or more frequently on WGBX, and one late 1970s local "nightclub"-style variety show, ''Club 44'', proved popular enough to be moved over to WGBH and retitled ''The Club''. The station airs PBS programs that are not aired by WGBH-TV as well as additional supplemental programming. Reruns of the previous night's programming either from WGBH-TV or from WGBX-TV itself also makes up part of channel 44's programming schedule. WGBX also carries most of the national

digital subchannel In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a method of transmitting more than one independent program stream simultaneously from the same digital radio or television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compress ...

networks (except for

World Channel WORLD Channel, also branded as WORLD, is an American digital multicast public television network owned and operated by the WGBH Educational Foundation. It is distributed by American Public Television and the National Educational Telecommunicatio ...

) which are managed by the WGBH Educational Foundation (along with an additional station, as described below); this enables WGBH to maintain a high-bitrate

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high definition picture resolution on its main channel 2 signal, with little loss in visual quality.

History

On December 11, 1963, the WGBH Educational Foundation applied for a construction permit to build a second station on channel 44; WGBX was approved on October 21, 1964. The station began broadcasting on September 25, 1967, and initially carried almost exclusively specialist programming, gradually turning into a second channel of educational and public programs. Since launching, its transmitter has been located in Needham (on a broadcast tower that is owned by

CBS Corporation The second incarnation of CBS Corporation (the first being a short-lived rename of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation) was an American multinational media conglomerate with interests primarily in commercial broadcasting, publishing, and t ...

, and is used by some of the Boston

market Market is a term used to describe concepts such as: *Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand *Market economy *Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market Geography *Märket, an ...

's commercial television stations, including CBS-owned

), WGBX's current digital transmitter shares the master antenna at the very top of the tower with the commercial stations. The now-defunct analog signal maintained a separate antenna on a lower portion of the tower that was shared with WGBH's digital transmitter. WGBX shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 44, on April 23, 2009. The station's digital signal continued to be broadcast on its pre-transition UHF channel 43. Through the use of

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 ...

digital television receivers display the station'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 its former UHF analog channel 44. World Channel moved from

44.2 to 2.2 in the spring of 2012, replacing WGBH's standard definition simulcast. WGBX-TV 44 logo

On January 16, 2017, WGBX switched its DT4 subchannel from a locally programmed loop of children's programming (which looped twice a day) to the relaunched national

PBS Kids PBS Kids is the brand for most of the children's programming aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Some public television children's programs are not produced by PBS member stations or transmitted by PBS. Instead, ...

channel. On January 18, 2018, WGBX began a channel share with

Nashua, New Hampshire Nashua is a city in southern New Hampshire, United States. At the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it had a population of 91,322, the second-largest in northern New England after nearby Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester. Along with Manc ...

-licensed WYCN-CD (channel 15, now

), which was acquired by the

NBC Owned Television Stations NBC Owned Television Stations (formerly NBC Local Media and NBC Television Stations Division (TVSD)) is the division of NBCUniversal Owned TV Stations (NBCUniversal), a subsidiary of Comcast that oversees the NBC owned-and-operated television s ...

subsidiary of

NBCUniversal NBCUniversal Media, LLC is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate corporation owned by Comcast and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States. NBCUniversal is primari ...

. Despite WBTS-CD's low-power status, WGBX's transmitter acts as a full-market relay of WBTS-CD, a

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an Television in the United States, American English-language Commercial broadcasting, commercial television network, broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Enterta ...

O&O station, along with its

Cozi TV Cozi TV (stylized on-air as COZI TV) is an American free-to-air television network owned by the NBC Owned Television Stations division of NBCUniversal. The network airs classic television series from the 1960s to the 2000s. The network origina ...

subchannel; WGBX's

multiplexer In electronics, a multiplexer (or mux; spelled sometimes as multiplexor), also known as a data selector, is a device that selects between several analog or digital input signals and forwards the selected input to a single output line. The sel ...

was then upgraded to handle WGBX's existing HD channel and two SD channels, along with WBTS-CD's HD channel and one subchannel as a result of the channel share. In 2019, with WGBH moving to VHF 5, both station's channel maps were adapted, with WGBH handling both the 2.1 and 44.1 HD signals, and WGBX mainly carrying standard definition subchannels in order to provide appropriate bandwidth to WYCN-CD, which itself had its calls changed to WBTS-CD in the same period of time. This is equivalent to the channel distribution plan used by

Twin Cities PBS Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. (abbreviated TPT, doing business as Twin Cities PBS) is a nonprofit organization based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States, that operates the Twin Cities' two PBS member television stations, KTCA-TV (chann ...

Minneapolis–Saint Paul Minneapolis–Saint Paul is a metropolitan area in the Upper Midwestern United States centered around the confluence of the Mississippi, Minnesota and St. Croix rivers in the U.S. state of Minnesota. It is commonly known as the Twin Cities ...

, which divides its subchannels among two existing stations (though all channels map to channel 2 rather than the second station's channel 17).

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 ...

. Note that WGBX-DT1 actually transmits as WGBH's second subchannel to provide a full-quality high definition signal for that station:

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wgbx-Tv PBS member stations Television channels and stations established in 1967 1967 establishments in Massachusetts GBX-TV WGBH Educational Foundation

History

Technical information

Subchannels

See also

References

External links