WNYB

WNYB, UHF digital channel 26, is a Christian-oriented religious television station serving Buffalo, New York, United States that is licensed to Jamestown, New York. The station is owned by Tri-State Christian Television. WNYB's studios are located at 5775 Big Tree Road in Orchard Park, and its transmitter is located at 9030 Center Road in Arkwright. The station's signal is rebroadcast on WBNF-CD (channel 15) in Buffalo and W42CO-D in Rochester.

WNYB is carried seen on Time Warner Cable channel 23 (not to be confused with CW affiliate WNLO, which broadcasts on virtual channel 23 over-the-air and is carried on cable channel 11) and on Atlantic Broadband channel 22. In both cases, WNYB is believed to be invoking must carry rights to require the providers to carry its signal.

History

The Channel 26 license has been in existence since the 1960s, when it was utilized by an independent station with the call letters WNYP-TV, from 1966 to 1969. The station's majority shareholder was Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, who later co-founded the Home Shopping Network.^[1] It was the first American television station to affiliate with a Canadian network, signing an affiliation deal with CTV. Since the station could not afford a direct feed, station engineers switched to and from the signal of CTV flagship CFTO-TV in Toronto whenever network programming was airing.

Paxson, at the time, had never owned a television station before, and as a result, the station had become notorious and almost legendary among Western New York's broadcast community of the day for gaffes and programming mishaps. Strange things took place that some at the time thought was due to incompetence, or even employee sabotage. For instance, the station showed the same episode of The Aquanauts several times, every day at the same time, over a two-week period. Also, the equipment used to pick up the CFTO off-air signal would relay the video from WNYS-TV in Syracuse or WWTV in Cadillac, Michigan instead, due to tropospheric propagation from those VHF channel 9 signals overwhelming that of CFTO's. Often, when CFTO programming actually was being rebroadcast, the station switcher failed to drop the CFTO identification to display the WNYP call letters, which was considered a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) violation. Inexplicably, the audio line from a Jamestown radio station could sometimes be heard in the background when CTV programming was airing.

Since CTV, then as now, relies largely on American programming, Buffalo's "Big 3" U.S. network affiliates (WBEN-TV, now WIVB-TV; WGR-TV, now WGRZ-TV; and WKBW-TV threatened legal action, and the station went dark, a week after curtailing local news broadcasts and abruptly laying off staff.

Shortly before it went dark, the station started to identify as WJTV, but quickly reverted to WNYP because a station in Jackson, Mississippi already had those call letters (Paxson later started the Pax TV network, now known as Ion Television, and owns WPXJ-TV (channel 51) in the market).

After going dark, the channel 26 allocation was used for much of the 1970s and 1980s by a low-power experimental Appalachian Television Service "translator" relay station (W26AA) of WNED-TV from Buffalo, operated by the regional Board of Cooperative Educational Services, which was able to originate local programming from studios in Fredonia. Channel 26 is the last remaining survivor of WNED's once massive translator network that had several repeaters scattered throughout the Southern Tier of Western New York; all of the remaining translators were shut down no later than 2012.

The license was re-issued to a new group years later, and channel 26 signed on again on September 24, 1988 under the new call letters WTJA. Part of the station's programming lineup duplicated those on the Buffalo stations. Much of the programming consisted of public domain material, and the station was virtually ignored by local advertisers. Buffalo area cable providers were unable to receive an adequate signal from the transmitter, and declined carriage on that basis. The "Grade B" signal coverage barely reached the southern Buffalo suburbs, and the station once again went dark in 1991, due to financial problems.

Grant Broadcasting purchased the license in 1995. Rather than immediately putting the station back on the air, Grant negotiated with Tri-State Christian Television, owner of WNYB (channel 49), for the channel 49 license, in exchange for the channel 26 facility, cash and a new broadcasting facility. With a new five megawatt transmitter and tall transmission tower in one of the highest hills of western New York State, channel 26 would change from having a very poor signal to one of the largest coverage areas in the Northeastern U.S., viewable from Erie, Pennsylvania to the southwest suburbs of Toronto, Ontario.

Tri-State accepted, and on January 10, 1997, it took over the channel 26 license, moving its religious programming and the WNYB call letters to the new channel (Grant in turn took over channel 49, which became WB affiliate WNYO-TV; it is now a MyNetworkTV affiliate).

Digital television

Digital channels

Analog-to-digital conversion

WNYB shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 26, in early May 2009, one month before the official June 12 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 relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 27 to UHF channel 26.^[3]

References

External links

• TCT
• Query the FCC's TV station database for WNYB
• Query the FCC's TV station database for WBNF-CD
• Query the FCC's TV station database for W42CO-D
• BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on WNYB-TV