WQEX

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WQEX-TV
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Branding	WQEX: America's Store
Channels	16 (UHF) analog, 26 (UHF) digital
Affiliations	America's Store
Owner	WQED Multimedia (brokered to America's Store)
Founded	March 10, 1953; Returned as WQEX March 20, 1959
Call letters meaning	"Q.E.X." Quad Erdo EXtra
Former callsigns	WENS (1953-1957)
Former affiliations	Independent (1953-57) NET / PBS (1959-04)
Website	WQEX site at WQED

WQEX-TV is a television station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It broadcasts its analog signal on UHF channel 16, and its digital signal on UHF channel 26. It currently airs programming from America's Store.

[edit] History

Channel 16 in Pittsburgh started out as WENS-TV, a commercial station which operated from 1953 to 1957 before going dark. The station became WQEX in March 1959, after WQED acquired the station for use as their secondary channel for their educational programs; it went dark in November 1961, but returned to the air over a year later, in January 1963.

WQEX-TV was one of the last stations in Pittsburgh (if not North America) to convert to color, in the 1980s (for decades, it had used the old black-and-white WENS transmitter). Having to live in the shadow of the much more powerful WQED, the money had never been available to convert WQEX to a color picture format. However, that changed in February of 1985, when the transmitter had broke down and the necessary parts to fix the obsolete transmitter were no longer available, forcing the station to go dark.

With limited time to restore WQEX to the air (to avoid forfeiture of the license), WQED-TV became far more aggressive in its pursuits to raise money to pay for a new transmitter, at times risking WQED's image along the way. Since pledge monies had to be diverted to WQEX, WQED had to reduce its broadcast hours in order to lower its own operating costs. The money saved went towards the transmitter piggybank.

WQEX finally returned to the air in the summer of 1986 in living color. They explained their extended time off the air between programs with a vignette called "The Little Transmitter That Could...couldn't anymore." One Pittsburgh radio engineer said there was nothing little about the old transmitter...that it "was the size of a Port Authority Transit Bus".

WQEX also became one of the first TV stations in the Pittsburgh market to introduce then-state-of-the-art Beta tape technology for airing its shows. Most local programming among its competitors had been delivered on film, reel videotape, or U-matic videocassetttes. Though Beta had already been long-abandoned by the consumer video market, it still produced a high-quality picture with crisp on-air resolution that gained popularity among television broadcast stations not only because of its quality, but also because of its smaller size and ease of storage.

After switching to color, they had a schedule for awhile that resembled an independent station, with reruns, movies and Britcoms. They even had an on-camera host, Pip Theodor, who introduced the programs, similar to what was done on MTV and Britain's ITV. By the late-1980s, they returned to more educational fare.

What was notable about this station during this era was its nightly sign-off -- WQEX-TV ended each night with a comedy sketch involving some men trying to make it home from a bar after 2AM, set to the song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life from Monty Python's The Life of Brian. This sketch is accompanied by fake closing credits -- viewers could have their name in these credits by making a pledge to WQEX-TV as part of the QEX Sign-Off Society. [1]

The station's sign on message also developed an on-air persona of its own...with the message followed by the 1955 Chuck Berry hit "Sweet Little 16" introduced as a "morning wake-up call from Mr. Charles Berry."

When funds began to run low in the early 1990s, the station began to simulcast WQED instead.

The station was almost sold to Cornerstone Television in 1999. The original plan was to move WPCB-TV from channel 40 to channel 16, with Paxson Communications buying channel 40 and converting it to a Pax TV affiliate. However, the religious shows proposed for air on the station were not deemed educational, breaching a requirement in WQEX's license as an educational station. Although the FCC reversed its position, Cornerstone withdrew its application and the sale was cancelled, keeping WQEX-TV as a WQED-TV simulcast.[2]

Since 2004, WQEX-TV has brokered much of its airtime to America's Store, a discount shopping channel from Home Shopping Network, with WQED-TV presenting three hours of required Educational / Informational (E/I) programming for kids on Tuesday mornings, plus repeats of WQED's news magazine, OnQ. Speculations of the station being redesignated as a commercial license still arise occasionally.

[edit] External links

• WQEX site at WQED
• Query the FCC's TV station database for WQEX