WCVE-TV (channel 23) is a

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member

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's s ...

Richmond, Virginia Richmond ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), U.S. commonwealth of Virginia. Incorporated in 1742, Richmond has been an independent city (United States), independent city since 1871. ...

, United States. Owned by the VPM Media Corporation (formerly known as the Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corporation), the station maintains studios and a transmitter at 23

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in Bon Air, a suburb of Richmond. WHTJ (channel 41) in

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operates as a full-time

satellite A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scient ...

of WCVE-TV; this station's transmitter is located atop Carters Mountain. WCVE-TV also operates a

sister station In broadcasting, sister stations or sister channels are radio or television stations operated by the same company, either by direct ownership or through a management agreement. Radio sister stations will often have different formats, and somet ...

in Richmond, WCVW (channel 57), whose transmitter is co-located with WCVE-TV. The three stations were collectively branded as the Community Idea Stations from 2001 until 2019, when Commonwealth Public Broadcasting rebranded its stations as VPM (short for Virginia Public Media), with WCVE-TV and WHTJ becoming VPM PBS and WCVW becoming VPM Plus.

History

The community-owned public broadcasting company was established in 1961 by Thomas Boushall (Chairman of the Richmond School Board and an officer of the Bank of Virginia) and a group of concerned citizens to employ television for educational purposes. The patron saints of public broadcasting in central Virginia were Boushall, E. Claiborne Robins Sr., Mary Ann Franklin, and Bill W. Spiller. Mrs. Franklin first approached Boushall and Henry I. Willett, then Superintendent of Richmond City Schools, with the idea of establishing an educational television station. Boushall and Franklin then recruited Spiller, who was hired in December 1963 and began working for them in January 1964. WCVE-TV's sister station, WCVW-TV (channel 57) signed on in 1967. Richmond became the first community in Virginia to have dual stations, and only the eighth in the nation to do so, doubling the amount of instructional programming provided to schools in central Virginia. Over 40 years later, both WCVE-TV and WCVW are still in operation. In 1974, Commonwealth Public Broadcasting took over WNVT-TV, a Fairfax public TV station on the verge of financial insolvency, in order to protect instructional television and educational services for schools in northern Virginia. In 1981, a second

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station, WNVC-TV, was established. These two stations provided international programming in English and several other languages tailored to the needs of the

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area's culturally diverse population. In 1988, Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education announced plans to give up its public radio license for WRFK, which had assumed a fine music format from WFMV. To ensure public radio would remain in Richmond, WCVE-FM radio went on the air as a National Public Radio (

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) member station. The following year, the company established WHTJ in Charlottesville. Before WHTJ's sign-on, Charlottesville had no full-powered PBS station; only a repeater of Harrisonburg's WVPT served the area. A TV and radio studio-office complex was added in 1991. After signing off at midnight almost daily for over 40 years, WCVE-TV and WCVW became 24-hour stations most days of the week in the fall of 2006. Starting in early 2008, the stylized "i" logo became the station's secondary logo, and the stations adopted a family of similar primary logos displaying their call letters.

Programming

Like most public television stations, this trio broadcasts shows distributed by PBS and

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, but they also create a range of local programs. WCVE-TV produces ''Virginia Currents'', a program profiling residents of the state, both typical and notable, which is aired by other PBS stations in Virginia such as Blue Ridge PBS and WVPT. WHTJ offers ''Charlottesville Inside-Out,'' hosted by musician Terri Allard. All of the programs are produced at WCVE-TV's studios in Richmond. National shows presented by WCVE-TV include ''Legacy List with Matt Paxton''.

Technical information

Subchannels

Analog-to-digital conversion

WCVE-TV, WCVW and WHTJ shut down their analog signals on March 30, 2009: * WCVE-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 ...

channel 23; the station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 42, using

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 as digits on a receiver's ...

23. * WCVW shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 57; the station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 44, using virtual channel 57. * WHTJ shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 41; the station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 46, using virtual channel 41. On April 7, 2022, WCVE-TV began hosting WCVW's 57.1 main channel, as a result of WCVW converting to the

ATSC 3.0 ATSC 3.0 is a major version of the ATSC standards for terrestrial television broadcasting created by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). The standards are designed to offer support for newer technologies, including High Effici ...

broadcast format. WCVE-TV uses its virtual channel number 23 instead of WCVW's virtual channel number 57.

References

Sources

*Fisher, Mark D. (2005) ''A Brief History of WFMV: Virginia's first stereophonic good music station''
Richmond Radio Group on Yahoo
Richmond, VA

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wcve-Tv 1964 establishments in Virginia PBS member stations Television channels and stations established in 1964 CVE-TV