WSJV
WSJV (channel 28) is a television station licensed to Elkhart, Indiana, in the United States, serving the South Bend-Elkhart market, known locally as Michiana. Its history spans more than seven decades and most of the major chapters of American network television: it began in 1954 as an early UHF station carrying NBC, ABC and DuMont, spent four decades as the market's ABC affiliate, became its Fox affiliate in 1995, and lost that affiliation in 2016, after which it has carried national digital multicast networks. The station is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside WSBT-TV (channel 22), the market's dual CBS and Fox affiliate. The two stations share studios on East Douglas Avenue in Mishawaka and transmitter facilities on Ironwood Road in southern South Bend.
WSJV also has a technical distinction that now defines its role: it serves as the South Bend market's ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, host station, transmitting in the new standard while partner stations carry its programme services in the established ATSC 1.0 format on its behalf. Its call letters refer to the St. Joseph River Valley, the river valley that links Elkhart and South Bend.
Sign-on in 1954 and the channel 52 years
WSJV first signed on the air on March 20, 1954. It originally broadcast on UHF channel 52, at a time when UHF television was still a difficult proposition for viewers, whose sets often required converters to receive it. The station arrived in a market that had been opened to television only shortly before: WSBT-TV had signed on in December 1952 as the area's first station, and WSJV's arrival in March 1954 took away the secondary NBC, ABC and DuMont affiliations that WSBT had been carrying, giving Michiana a second full-time service.
At sign-on, WSJV was affiliated with NBC and ABC, and it also carried DuMont programming during that network's final years. The NBC affiliation was brief. When WNDU-TV (channel 16) signed on in 1955, NBC moved to the new station, leaving WSJV as an ABC affiliate with its DuMont clearance ending as that network failed. In 1958, WSJV moved from channel 52 to channel 28, the assignment it has kept ever since; WSBT made a similar move the same year, consolidating both of the market's UHF stations on lower, better-propagating channels.
Four decades with ABC
From the mid-1950s until 1995, WSJV was Michiana's ABC affiliate, one of the longest continuous network relationships in the market's history. Operating from studios on County Road 7 in unincorporated Elkhart County, with its transmitter on Johnson Road in St. Joseph County, the station was the Elkhart-based counterpart to South Bend's WSBT and WNDU. For generations of viewers in northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan, channel 28 was simply the ABC station, carrying the network's news, sports and entertainment schedules and producing local programming and newscasts for the Elkhart side of the market.
The station's owner for most of this era and beyond was Quincy Newspapers, the Illinois-based newspaper and broadcasting company, which operated WSJV as part of a group of stations in smaller Midwestern markets. That stable ownership and affiliation made the changes of the mid-1990s, when they came, all the more abrupt.
The 1995 switch to Fox
The switch grew out of national sports rights. Starting with the 1994 season, Fox held the rights to National Football League games, and the network began looking for affiliates in markets where it had none; South Bend was the largest such market in the country. Before the switch, only some Fox programming, including its NFL telecasts, had aired locally on CBS affiliate WSBT-TV, while the network's full schedule reached the market only on cable, through stations imported from Chicago, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids or Detroit.
Fox signed an affiliation agreement with Quincy Newspapers in 1995, and WSJV ended its forty-year ABC affiliation to join Fox that year, with the change taking effect in October 1995. ABC, left without a full-power home in Michiana, ultimately affiliated with a new low-power station launched by Weigel Broadcasting, W58BT, which became WBND, the market's improbable low-power ABC affiliate. WSJV, rebranded around its new network as the market's Fox station, carried Fox programming for the next twenty-one years.
Fox Michiana
As a Fox affiliate, WSJV broadcast as Fox 28, and later under the Fox Michiana identity, presenting itself as the Fox service for the whole Michiana region. The station operated its own news department during this period and was the market's home for Fox network prime time, Fox sports, including the NFL package that had prompted the affiliation in the first place, and syndicated programming in the hours outside the network schedule.
The Fox era ended not because of a network dispute but because of a transaction. In 2016, Quincy sold the programming rights and the Fox affiliation of WSJV to WSBT-TV. Fox programming became a subchannel of WSBT, where it continues as the second service of that station. WSJV's news operation was disbanded at the transfer, which took effect on August 1, 2016, and during a sixty-day transition period channel 28.1 simulcast the Fox Michiana service from its new home while the change was completed.
The multicast years
Stripped of the Fox affiliation, WSJV did not go dark. Instead, from 2016 it became a carrier of national digital multicast networks, with Heroes & Icons, the classic-television network, as its primary service from 2016 until 2025. Its subchannel line-up in that period also included the Justice Network, Court TV Mystery, Court TV, Quest, Bounce TV and Dabl, a typical portfolio of the advertiser-supported diginets that filled the schedules of stations that had lost major network affiliations in the 2010s.
The station's current primary service is Roar, Sinclair's digital multicast entertainment network. The change reflects its latest ownership: WSJV spent the Gray Television period, beginning with Gray's acquisition of Quincy in 2021, as a multicast carrier, and in June 2025 Sinclair purchased the station's broadcast assets from Gray, in a transaction in which Sinclair simultaneously sold the broadcast assets of WHOI in Peoria-Bloomington to Gray. WSJV thus became a sister station to WSBT-TV, the very station that had taken its Fox affiliation nine years earlier, reuniting channels 22 and 28 under one owner for the first time.
Ownership history
For most of its life, WSJV belonged to Quincy Newspapers, later Quincy Media, which held the station through its ABC and Fox eras. When Gray Television acquired Quincy in 2021, Gray successfully petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for permission to retain WSJV despite the overlap with its South Bend NBC affiliate, WNDU-TV, an exception that allowed the station to remain in the Gray group alongside a direct competitor. The 2025 trade to Sinclair ended that arrangement and placed channel 28 in the group of its CBS and Fox competitor, WSBT-TV.
ATSC 3.0 host station
WSJV's present technical role is as the market's ATSC 3.0 lighthouse. Under the NextGen TV transition model used in the United States, one station in a market converts its transmitter to the ATSC 3.0 standard and hosts the 3.0 signals of participating stations, while those partner stations broadcast the lighthouse station's own programme services in ATSC 1.0 so that viewers with existing receivers lose nothing. In South Bend, four other commercial stations in the market each broadcast some of WSJV's subchannels in ATSC 1.0 on its behalf, while WSJV's own transmitter carries the market's NextGen TV services. This arrangement gives the former Fox affiliate a central place in the market's technical future even though its own programme line-up now consists of multicast networks.
Technical information
WSJV broadcasts digitally on UHF channel 30, displayed as virtual channel 28. Its transmitter facilities, shared with WSBT-TV, are on Ironwood Road in southern South Bend; the station previously used a transmitter on Johnson Road in unincorporated St. Joseph County, east of Gulivoire Park. In the analog era the station broadcast on channel 52 from 1954 to 1958 and on channel 28 from 1958 to 2009. Its digital signal operated on channel 58 from 2002 to 2009, on channel 28 from 2009 to 2019, and on channel 30 following the spectrum repack. The station's FCC facility ID is 74007.
Place in the Michiana market
WSJV's trajectory, from pioneering UHF network affiliate to long-serving ABC station, to the Fox affiliate created by the NFL rights deal, to a multicast carrier and NextGen TV lighthouse, is a compact history of American local television itself. The Elkhart licence that signed on in 1954 still anchors channel 28 in the South Bend market; what has changed, repeatedly and completely, is what a licence of that kind is used for.
