About WPXG-TV

WPXG-TV

WPXG-TV is a television station licensed to Concord, New Hampshire, in the United States, broadcasting the Ion Television network on virtual channel 21 for the southern New Hampshire and Boston-area audience. The station is owned through Ion Media, part of the E. W. Scripps Company, and operates as a satellite of WBPX-TV, the Ion owned-and-operated station in Boston, duplicating that station's programming for viewers in New Hampshire. It shares its channel with WYDN, a Daystar station, and transmits from Fort Mountain near Epsom, New Hampshire. The licence behind WPXG-TV has lived two distinct lives. It was first used between 1984 and 1989 by WNHT, an ambitious independent station that became southern New Hampshire's first CBS affiliate and then failed. After six years of silence, the licence was revived in 1995 by Boston University as WNBU, a satellite of its Boston station WABU, and in 1999 both stations were sold to become outlets of the Pax network, beginning the station's present existence as an Ion satellite under the WPXG call letters.

First life: WNHT, New Hampshire's own station

Channel 21 at Concord first went on the air on April 16, 1984, as WNHT, call letters proclaiming We're New Hampshire Television. The station was built to serve a region with a structural oddity: southern New Hampshire, though populous and fast-growing, lay inside the Boston television market, and its viewers were served mainly by Boston's powerful stations. WNHT set out to be a genuinely New Hampshire service. In its first months it ran a business news format during the daytime, with off-network sitcoms, dramas and films in the evening, then dropped the business format in the autumn of 1985 for a conventional independent schedule. The station was sold within its first months to The Flatley Company, the organisation of New Hampshire real estate developer Thomas Flatley, which owned it for most of its existence. After a difficult start with very low ratings, WNHT settled into a traditional independent programme mix, added some children's programming, and by 1986 was operating profitably with respectable audiences — proof, it seemed, that a New Hampshire-based commercial station could work.

The CBS gamble and the collapse of 1989

WNHT's owners believed research showed the region needed its own CBS affiliate, since New Hampshire viewers otherwise depended on CBS stations in Boston and Portland, Maine. On February 1, 1988, WNHT affiliated with CBS, becoming southern New Hampshire's first affiliate of the network, and on May 28 that year it established a full news department, airing local newscasts in the morning, at midday and in the early and late evening. The venture failed to change viewing habits. Audiences stayed loyal to the established CBS stations in the neighbouring markets, whose signals reached Concord over the air in any case; cable systems across southeastern New Hampshire carried WNHT, but systems in the west and north of the state did not, and those that did also carried at least one of the competing CBS affiliates, with no syndication exclusivity or must-carry rules then in force to force the out-of-market stations off the dial. Ratings disappointed despite the news investment, staff were laid off at the end of 1988, the morning, midday and early-evening newscasts were cancelled by March 1989, and on March 31, 1989, WNHT ceased broadcasting altogether. New Hampshire has not had a CBS affiliate of its own since. Some of the station's programme assets passed to Derry's channel 50, but the channel 21 licence itself went dark.

Six silent years and the Boston University revival

The Concord licence remained silent for more than six years. Its revival came as a side effect of a Boston transaction. In 1993, after The Christian Science Monitor's costly television venture collapsed, Boston University bought Boston's channel 68, the former WQTV, and relaunched it as the commercial independent WABU. While arranging that purchase, the university also acquired other dormant television properties, including, later in 1993, the silent WNHT licence in Concord. Returning channel 21 to the air took time: the university could not broadcast from Concord until 1995, delayed in part by complaints from other New Hampshire stations about competition. When the station did return, on September 1, 1995, it did so under new call letters, WNBU, as a full-time satellite of WABU, extending the Boston station's general entertainment schedule, local programmes and sports coverage across southern New Hampshire. Together with a Cape Cod satellite, the combination gave Boston University's station regional coverage across eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire surpassed among Boston outlets only by the region's longtime superstation, WSBK.

Sold to Paxson: WPXG is born

Boston University's experiment in commercial television ended at the close of the decade. In 1999 the university sold WABU and its satellites to Paxson Communications, Lowell Paxson's company, which was converting its national station group into the backbone of the Pax TV network. Channel 68 in Boston became WBPX-TV, and the Concord station took the call letters WPXG in July 1999, its PX element, like that of its Boston parent, referencing Pax. From that point WPXG-TV's purpose was fixed and has not changed since: it exists to duplicate the Boston Ion station's programming for the New Hampshire portion of the Boston market, ensuring that viewers in Concord, Manchester and the surrounding communities receive the network's signal from a local full-power transmitter rather than relying on the Boston station's coverage at the northern edge of its range. When Pax TV rebranded itself as i in 2005 and then as Ion Television in 2007, WPXG followed each change automatically, since its schedule has always been a mirror of WBPX.

Satellite operation and the Boston market

WPXG-TV's satellite status reflects the geography of its market. Concord and Manchester are New Hampshire's capital and largest city respectively, but both lie within the Boston designated market area, one of the ten largest television markets in the United States, and both are close enough to Boston that its VHF stations have long reached them, yet far enough north that UHF coverage from Boston transmitters is uneven. A Concord-licensed satellite solves that problem for the network: channel 21's transmitter on Fort Mountain near Epsom, operating in its current digital configuration at 80.6 kilowatts with an antenna height of 342 metres, covers the population centres of southern and central New Hampshire. The station maintains no studios, newscasts or local programming of its own, and it is licensed and regulated as part of the Ion group in Boston, with the licence held by Ion Media's Boston licensing company. Its sister stations in the group are Boston's WBPX-TV and Woburn-licensed WDPX-TV, which shares spectrum with WBPX.

Digital transition and channel sharing

WPXG's analogue service on channel 21 ended with the national digital transition in 2009; before the transition its digital signal had operated on UHF channel 33, and after the subsequent spectrum repack the station settled on digital channel 23, continuing to identify to viewers as channel 21. The modern WPXG operates as a shared channel: its spectrum carries both its own Ion multiplex and the licence of WYDN, the Daystar network station licensed to Lowell, Massachusetts, whose programme service appears on virtual channel 48 from the same Fort Mountain facility. This channel-sharing arrangement, of the kind that became common after the FCC's incentive auction, allows two separately licensed stations to broadcast from one transmitter while each keeps its own channel identity for viewers. WPXG's own multiplex mirrors the Boston station's line-up: Ion Television in high definition on 21.1, followed by subchannels carrying services from its owner's portfolio, including Ion Mystery, Busted, Bounce TV, Ion Plus, Game Show Central and HSN2.

Under Scripps ownership

WPXG passed, along with the rest of the Ion group, into new corporate ownership in 2021, when the E. W. Scripps Company completed its $2.65 billion acquisition of Ion Media on January 7 of that year. Scripps combined Ion with its Katz networks to form a national networks division, divesting twenty-three Ion stations to Inyo Broadcast Holdings to secure regulatory approval while retaining the owned-and-operated core, including the Boston stations and their Concord satellite. The direct consequences for WPXG were felt in its subchannels rather than its main service: when Qubo, Ion Plus and Ion Shop ceased broadcasting in February 2021, the group's secondary channels were restocked with Scripps multicast networks, and later changes, including the introduction of new Scripps services on Ion transmitters in 2021 and the return of Ion Plus in 2024, flowed automatically to the Concord satellite as part of the shared network feed. WPXG itself required no local decisions in any of this — a measure of how completely its operations are integrated into its parent station and its owner's national system.

What WPXG means for New Hampshire viewers

Judged by local output, WPXG-TV is the quietest full-power station in New Hampshire: no local news, no local programmes, no local studios. Judged by coverage, however, it performs a function no other facility performs for its owner: it guarantees that the Ion network, and the family of free over-the-air multicast services carried with it, reaches the roughly half-million residents of southern and central New Hampshire with a strong local signal, on the same virtual channel position it has occupied since 1995. There is an irony in that role. The channel 21 licence was created for a station, WNHT, that tried to give New Hampshire a television voice of its own and failed within five years; the licence endures today precisely because its second incarnation abandoned local ambition entirely and succeeded as a relay. For viewers in Concord and Manchester, channel 21 nonetheless remains a fixture of the dial — first as a bold local experiment, and for more than a quarter of a century now as New Hampshire's window on a national network.

WPXG-TV today

Today WPXG-TV continues to broadcast from Fort Mountain near Epsom as the Concord, New Hampshire satellite of Boston's WBPX-TV, carrying Ion Television and its companion multicast networks to the New Hampshire portion of the Boston market on virtual channel 21. Owned by Scripps through Ion Media and operated in tandem with its Boston sister stations, it shares its channel with Daystar's WYDN and maintains the northern coverage that completes the Ion group's footprint in eastern New England. Its history — a failed CBS affiliate reborn as a university satellite and then absorbed into two successive national station groups — captures, in one licence, the transformation of UHF broadcasting in smaller New England communities from local enterprise to national distribution.