WSPX-TV (channel 56) is a

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 ...

Syracuse, New York Syracuse ( ) is a City (New York), city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, Onondaga County, New York, United States. It is the fifth-most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffa ...

, United States, airing programming from the

Ion Television Ion Television is an American broadcast television network owned by the Katz Broadcasting subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company. The network first began broadcasting on August 31, 1998, as Pax TV, focusing primarily on family-oriented enter ...

network.

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 the

Ion Media Ion Media (formerly known as Paxson Communications Corporation and Ion Media Networks) was an American broadcasting company that owned and operated over 71 television stations in most major American markets (through its television stations group ...

subsidiary of the

E. W. Scripps Company The E. W. Scripps Company is an American broadcasting company founded in 1878 as a chain of daily newspapers by Edward Willis "E. W." Scripps and his sister, Ellen Browning Scripps. It was also formerly a media conglomerate. The company is he ...

, the station maintains studios on Basile Rowe in

East Syracuse East Syracuse is an incorporated village and a suburb of the City of Syracuse in eastern Onondaga County, New York, United States. As of the 2010 U.S. census, the village had a population of 3,084. It is located immediately east of Syracuse, i ...

and a transmitter on Sevier Road in

Pompey, New York Pompey is a town in the southeast part of Onondaga County, New York. The population was 7,080 at the time of the 2010 census. The town was named after the Roman general and political leader Pompey by a late 18th-century clerk interested in the Clas ...

History

WSPX-TV has been operating since November 24, 1998. From 2001 to 2005, WSPX re-aired newscasts from

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 ...

affiliate

WSTM-TV WSTM-TV (channel 3) is a television station in Syracuse, New York, United States, affiliated with NBC and The CW. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which provides certain services to CBS affiliate WTVH (channel 5) through a local marketing ...

(channel 3).

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 ...

: WSPX-TV started broadcasting in high definition in May 2010. The channel 15 frequency was short-spaced to

Belleville, Ontario Belleville is a city in Ontario, Canada situated on the eastern end of Lake Ontario, located at the mouth of the Moira River and on the Bay of Quinte. Belleville is between Ottawa and Toronto, along the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor. Its population ...

's CBLFT-13 and was approved on the condition that the

effective radiated power Effective radiated power (ERP), synonymous with equivalent radiated power, is an IEEE standardized definition of directional radio frequency (RF) power, such as that emitted by a radio transmitter. It is the total power in watts that would hav ...

of the U.S. station not exceed 100

kilowatt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James Wa ...

s. According to WSPX-TV, an early reduction in analogue power and start of digital operation needed to take place months in advance of the February 17, 2009, FCC digital transition deadline to ensure that channel 15's antenna could be installed on the top of the tower in place of the existing channel 56 antenna before the onset of winter. UHF 56 was then left operational from a secondary, side-mounted antenna at a 25% reduction in coverage area until analogue shut-off.

Analog-to-digital conversion

WSPX-TV shut down its analog signal, over

UHF Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter (on ...

channel 56, 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 UHF channel 15. 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 A ...

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

References

External links

* Ion Television affiliates Court TV affiliates Grit (TV network) affiliates Ion Mystery affiliates Defy TV affiliates Scripps News affiliates E. W. Scripps Company television stations Television channels and stations established in 1998 1998 establishments in New York (state) SPX-TV {{NewYork-tv-station-stub