WJSP

WJSP, generally styled WJSP-TV, is a non-commercial educational television station licensed to Columbus, Georgia, in the United States. Broadcasting on virtual channel 28, it is a member station of Georgia Public Broadcasting, the statewide public television and radio service operated by the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission, and it carries programming from PBS. WJSP signed on August 10, 1964, as the fifth public television station in Georgia, and it serves west-central Georgia and the Chattahoochee Valley, including the Columbus area and far east-central Alabama across the state line. Unusually for the Georgia network, whose stations are mostly licensed to smaller towns, WJSP is one of only two Georgia Public Broadcasting stations licensed to a major Georgia city, the other being WVAN-TV in Savannah. Its transmitter, shared with WJSP-FM radio, stands south of Warm Springs, and in keeping with the network's practice of naming two communities in station identifications, the station is identified on air as WJSP-DT 28, Columbus and Warm Springs.

Coverage Area and the Columbus Market

WJSP primarily serves the northern and central portions of the Columbus television market. The Columbus area sits on the Chattahoochee River at the Alabama line, and the station's service extends into far east-central Alabama as well as west-central Georgia. Its signal travels in roughly a 45-mile radius from the transmitter site, and it also reaches the far southern and southwestern parts of the Atlanta metropolitan area; for some viewers there it is a better source of Georgia Public Broadcasting than the flagship station WGTV, because Warm Springs lies geographically within the Atlanta market's southern reach. Coverage within Columbus itself is more complicated. Although WJSP is the official Georgia Public Broadcasting station for Columbus, its signal has historically been marginal in much of the city proper, even though Warm Springs is only about forty-five minutes north. The southern portion of the Columbus market, including much of Columbus itself, is served by WACS-TV, the network station whose transmitter at Parrott lies almost an hour south of the city. The two stations therefore divide the market between them, with WJSP covering its northern and central parts and WACS covering the south.

The Channel 28 Frequency Before WJSP

The channel 28 allocation at Columbus had a commercial history before it became an educational one. Channel 28 was the original home of Columbus's first television station, which signed on October 6, 1953, as WDAK-TV and later became WTVM. That station began as a primary NBC affiliate with a secondary ABC affiliation, owned by local radio interests and a theater chain. In 1960 WTVM moved from UHF channel 28 to VHF channel 9 as part of a three-way switch approved by the Federal Communications Commission, in which WRBL in Columbus moved from channel 4 to channel 3 and WTVY in Dothan, Alabama, moved from channel 9 to channel 4. The shuffle, made possible because the same ownership had earlier moved a Rome, Georgia, station to Chattanooga, left channel 28 vacant at Columbus. The Georgia educational authorities took up the freed frequency, and four years later it returned to the air as WJSP, converting a pioneering commercial allocation into the region's public television channel.

Sign-On in 1964 and the Peters Call Sign

WJSP-TV signed on August 10, 1964, becoming the fifth public television station in Georgia. It was built as part of the Georgia Board of Education's effort, running from 1960 to 1964, to launch educational television stations across the state to provide in-school instruction, an initiative that grew into the Georgia Educational Television Network. The network aired Board of Education-produced classes for schools during the day and evening programming supplied by WGTV, the University of Georgia station in Athens. WJSP's call letters honor James S. Peters of Manchester, Georgia, a longtime state legislator and member of the Georgia Board of Education, whose initials the station carries. The choice reflected the system's origins in state education governance: several Georgia educational stations were named for figures in the state's education leadership, and WJSP's transmitter site south of Warm Springs, in the same west-central Georgia country Peters represented, has carried his initials ever since.

Transmitter Site at Warm Springs

Although licensed to Columbus, WJSP has never transmitted from within the city. Its transmitter is located just south of Warm Springs, near the intersection of U.S. Route 27 and Georgia State Route 190, just inside Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park, on the same tower as WJSP-FM, the Georgia Public Broadcasting radio station on 88.1 FM. The elevated site explains both the strengths and the limits of the station's coverage: height in the hills near Warm Springs gives the signal its long reach northward toward southern metro Atlanta, while the distance from Columbus, combined for many years with a directional antenna pattern, left parts of the city of license with a weaker signal than viewers might have expected. Current technical listings for the station record an effective radiated power of 21.4 kilowatts and a height above average terrain of 1,416 feet on its present low-band VHF facility, with a nondirectional antenna. The station has also been served by a broadcast translator at Carrollton, in the southwestern corner of the Atlanta market, extending Georgia Public Broadcasting service into an area between the Columbus and Atlanta signals.

Place in the Georgia Public Broadcasting Network

WJSP is one of nine full-power television stations that make up the Georgia Public Broadcasting television network, all of which carry the same programming. The network's modern form dates to the consolidation of the early 1980s. The University of Georgia's WGTV had operated separately for its first twenty-two years, supplying much of the non-instructional evening programming seen on the Board of Education transmitters, including WJSP. In November 1980, Governor George Busbee proposed merging WGTV with the state's transmitter network under a new Georgia Public Telecommunications body; after the proposal stalled in the legislature, he revived it by executive order, and on January 1, 1982, the new council took operational control of WGTV and the combined service rebranded as Georgia Public Television, the direct predecessor of today's Georgia Public Broadcasting. By June 1982 WGTV was fully incorporated and the university's role was reduced to program supplier. WJSP thus passed from the Board of Education's educational network into the unified statewide public broadcasting service without changing its channel, its transmitter or its basic function. Licenses for the network, WJSP's included, are held by the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission.

Programming

All nine Georgia Public Broadcasting stations carry the same programming on each of their channels, so WJSP's schedule is the network schedule: PBS national programs, including news, documentary, cultural and children's programming, together with productions originated by Georgia Public Broadcasting itself for Georgia audiences. The network produces Georgia-focused public affairs and documentary content and provides educational programming for the state's schools, a mission that descends directly from the in-school instruction service for which WJSP was built in 1964. Because the service is unified, viewers in Columbus see the same programs at the same times as viewers in Atlanta, Savannah or Macon; what distinguishes WJSP is purely its transmitter's footprint over the Chattahoochee Valley. The station identifies within the network's two-city convention as Columbus and Warm Springs, a pairing that acknowledges both its city of license and the community nearest its tower.

Digital Conversion and Early Digital Years

WJSP began its digital service in 2003, with a reduced-power digital signal on UHF channel 23. The choice of a permanent digital channel involved an early complication: the station had originally chosen to return to channel 28 for digital television during the first-round digital channel election, but an interference conflict forced it to remain permanently on channel 23 instead. When the national transition arrived, WJSP shut down its analog signal on UHF channel 28 on February 17, 2009, the original transition date that Georgia Public Broadcasting's stations observed as part of the federally mandated conversion. Its digital signal remained on channel 23, using program and system information protocol to display virtual channel 28 on receivers, preserving the channel number Columbus viewers had known since 1964. The station has been digital-only since that date.

The 2019 Move to Channel 5

The spectrum repack that followed the national incentive auction brought WJSP a second digital channel change. On July 17, 2017, the station received a permit to relocate from RF channel 23 to low-band VHF channel 5 as part of the Federal Communications Commission's repacking process. The original proposal would have cut the station's power dramatically, from 177 kilowatts to 1.45 kilowatts, alongside dropping its directional antenna pattern; an amendment filed in October 2017 raised the authorized power to 21.4 kilowatts. The new VHF facility signed on in the spring of 2019, and the station was licensed to operate on channel 5 effective April 5, 2019, still displaying virtual channel 28. The move fits a broader pattern at Georgia Public Broadcasting, which has placed most of its stations on VHF because the lower effective radiated power required there, typically tens of kilowatts rather than up to a thousand on UHF, reduces the cost of transmitters and electricity. For viewers, the change meant that receiving WJSP after 2019 increasingly required an antenna suited to low-band VHF, a practical adjustment across the Columbus and Warm Springs area.

Subchannels and Present Service

WJSP's digital signal carries the network's four standard program streams. Channel 28.1 carries the main Georgia Public Broadcasting and PBS service in high definition. Channel 28.2 carries Create, the lifestyle and how-to network. Channel 28.3 carries GPB Knowledge, which shares its schedule with World Channel documentary and news programming. Channel 28.4 carries PBS Kids, the children's service. The network also operates translators in the hilly terrain of north Georgia, including a Carrollton translator rebroadcasting WJSP, which extends the station's effective reach northwest of its home territory. Georgia Public Broadcasting's headquarters and production facilities are in Atlanta, and its website is gpb.org. More than sixty years after it signed on as Georgia's fifth educational station, WJSP continues to serve the purpose set for it in 1964: delivering a statewide public television service, and a feed of programming for Georgia's schools, to Columbus, the Chattahoochee Valley and the communities around Warm Springs.