WQCW
WQCW (channel 30), branded on air as Tri-State's CW, is a television station licensed to Portsmouth, Ohio, in the United States, serving as the affiliate of The CW for the Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia, television market. It is one of only two commercial television stations in that market licensed outside West Virginia, alongside WTSF (channel 61) in Ashland, Kentucky. WQCW is owned by Gray Media alongside Huntington-licensed NBC affiliate WSAZ-TV (channel 3). The two stations share studios on 5th Avenue in Huntington, West Virginia, and WQCW's transmitter is located on Barker Ridge near Milton, West Virginia.
The station signed on in 1998 as WHCP, an affiliate of The WB, changed its call letters to WQCW when it joined The CW in 2006, and passed through the ownership of Commonwealth Broadcasting and Lockwood Broadcast Group before Gray acquired it in 2014. Its call sign is explained as standing for quality television and The CW. For a market that is among the largest by land area east of the Mississippi River, WQCW has spent its whole life solving the same problem: how to deliver a UHF network signal across 61 counties of rugged, dissected plateau country.
A channel authorised long before it was used
Although WQCW dates its operation from 1998, the channel 30 allocation at Portsmouth had been authorised far earlier. A construction permit for channel 30 was issued in 1984 under the call letters WUXA, but no station was built, and the channel sat unused for fourteen years. It was not until 1998 that a station finally signed on: WHCP, which took to the air on October 5, 1998, as an affiliate of The WB. The launch gave the Charleston-Huntington market a full-time WB service on a locally based station for the first time.
In 2000, WHCP added a second network. UPN programming, dropped by WVAH-TV, moved to channel 30 as a secondary affiliation, although the station retained its on-air identity as WB30. The arrangement was a compromise typical of smaller markets of the period: WB programmes aired in their normal pattern, while UPN shows were scheduled at odd hours, sometimes after WB prime time ended and sometimes on weekends.
The coverage problem
From the beginning, WHCP's central difficulty was geography. The Charleston-Huntington market covers 61 counties in central West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio, most of it rugged hill country in which UHF signals travel poorly. Despite an analog effective radiated power of more than two million watts, the station's transmitter, located west of Portsmouth at the very edge of the market, could not cover the whole territory, and the station identified itself on air as Portsmouth-Charleston in acknowledgment of the distance between its licence city and the market's population centres.
WHCP could not simply move or raise its power: increasing its signal would have risked interference with digital stations in Roanoke, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Shortly after going on the air, it therefore signed on two low-power satellite stations, one in Huntington, channel 69, and one in Charleston, channel 53, which later carried call signs including WVCW-LP and WOCW-LP. Even with the repeaters, the station depended on cable and satellite carriage for most of its viewership, which is close to essential for acceptable television service in much of the market, particularly in eastern Kentucky. Dish Network carried the station from its first local Huntington-Charleston package; DirecTV followed on January 25, 2006, added the station in high definition on November 9, 2010, and Dish added high definition on March 7, 2012.
A brief first attempt at local news
Under its original owner, Commonwealth Broadcasting, the station made one short-lived attempt to operate as a full local news competitor. On November 7, 2005, WHCP began airing locally produced newscasts at 6 and 10 p.m. The effort lasted only about four months. The lead anchor resigned on February 21, 2006, and two days later, on February 23, the news staff was dismissed and the newscast was cancelled, with management citing low ratings. Local news would not return to channel 30 until it arrived in a different form, produced by WSAZ, nearly a decade later.
From WHCP to WQCW: the CW transition
The year 2006 remade the station, as it did WB affiliates across the country. With The WB and UPN merging into The CW, channel 30 joined the new network, and on May 31, 2006, it changed its call letters from WHCP to WQCW in anticipation of the launch. It initially branded itself as The Q, with a logo in which The CW's emblem turned into a capital Q, before settling on the Tri-State's CW identity it uses today, a reference to the Ohio-West Virginia-Kentucky tri-state region the market serves.
Ownership changed soon afterwards. On January 20, 2007, Commonwealth Broadcasting agreed to sell the station to Lockwood Broadcast Group, and the deal closed on May 21, 2007. The purchase fitted Lockwood's portfolio: all of Lockwood's stations were either primary CW stations or carried The CW on a digital subchannel. Under Lockwood, the station's schedule of local programming, which had included Saturday afternoon professional wrestling from a Portsmouth-based promotion and taped local high school football and basketball, was wound down.
Digital transition and transmitter moves
WQCW shut down its analog signal on UHF channel 30 on June 12, 2009, the official date of the national digital transition for full-power stations. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 17, using virtual channel 30, and was later relocated in the spectrum repack; the station now broadcasts digitally on channel 15. A more consequential move for viewers was geographic: the station's digital transmitter was relocated from the Portsmouth side of the market to a site on Barker Ridge near Milton, on the Huntington side, placing the signal within over-the-air reach of far more of the market than the original analog plant had achieved.
The station's authorised facilities reflect that repositioning. WQCW operates with an effective radiated power of 1,000 kW at a height above average terrain of 385.7 metres (1,265 feet), under FCC facility ID 65130.
Gray Television ownership
The station's path to its current owner was indirect. In November 2013, Excalibur Broadcasting agreed to buy WQCW and operate it under a shared services agreement with Gray Television. Excalibur then withdrew, and in February 2014 Gray Television acquired the station directly; the purchase was consummated on April 2, 2014. Gray already owned the market's NBC affiliate, WSAZ-TV, and WQCW became its sister station, moving into WSAZ's studios on 5th Avenue in Huntington.
The combination reshaped channel 30's local role. WSAZ's 10 p.m. newscast, which had aired on WSAZ's own second subchannel, was moved to WQCW and expanded to a full hour, giving the market a full-power home for prime-time news. WSAZ-branded morning news also airs on the station on weekday mornings. Unlike the station's ill-fated in-house news department of 2005 and 2006, the present newscasts are produced by the established WSAZ newsroom, with channel 30 serving as the distribution platform.
Subchannels
WQCW's digital signal is multiplexed. Channel 30.1, in high definition, carries The CW. Channel 30.2 carries Heroes & Icons, 30.3 carries Start TV, 30.4 carries Quest, and 30.5 carries the network listed as The365, also known as 365BLK. In addition, WQCW's transmitter broadcasts WSAZ-TV's main NBC service, displayed as channel 3.1, on behalf of its sister station as part of the market's ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV hosting arrangements, under which stations carry one another's signals during the transition to the new broadcast standard.
The tri-state market
WQCW's identity is inseparable from the peculiar geography of its market. Charleston, the state capital, and Huntington, its largest neighbouring city, anchor a market that crosses three states and is measured in dozens of counties rather than metropolitan population. A station licensed to Portsmouth, Ohio, owned with a Huntington station, transmitting from near Milton, West Virginia, and branding itself for the Tri-State is a literal embodiment of that market. The CW service it provides reaches most of its audience by cable and satellite, but its over-the-air improvements since 2009 have steadily reduced the coverage gap that defined its first decade.
Summary
WQCW went on the air in 1998 as WHCP, fourteen years after its channel was first permitted, bringing The WB to the Charleston-Huntington market and adding UPN as a secondary service in 2000. It became WQCW and joined The CW in 2006, passed from Commonwealth Broadcasting to Lockwood in 2007, ended analog broadcasting in 2009, and joined Gray Media and WSAZ in 2014, gaining WSAZ-produced morning and 10 p.m. newscasts. A Portsmouth-licensed station serving a mostly West Virginia market, it remains the Tri-State's CW outlet.
