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WWRS-TV (channel 52) is a religious television station licensed to Mayville, Wisconsin, United States, serving the Milwaukee and Madison areas as an owned-and-operated station of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). The station's transmitter is located in Hubbard. WWRS-TV's signal covers much of southeastern and south-central Wisconsin, along with extended cable coverage throughout the area.

History

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The station was formerly owned by National Minority Television, a de facto subsidiary of TBN that was used by the network to circumvent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s television station ownership restrictions. While TBN founder Paul Crouch was NMTV's president, one of its directors was African American and the other was Latino, which met the FCC's definition of a "minority-controlled" firm. In mid-2008, the station and its NMTV sisters came directly under TBN ownership.

Like most TBN stations, WWRS simulcasts the TBN national feed for most of the day. TBN typically buys full-power stations mainly to get must-carry status on area cable systems, even though it offers almost no locally produced programming. However, WWRS airs FCC-required public affairs programming (Public Report) from its Brookfield studios, with a nominal presence retained in at the station's transmitting facility and former main studio in Iron Ridge. The station also airs church services from throughout the area, usually on Friday morning.

Charter Communications, the dominant cable provider in the Madison area, and several communities in the Milwaukee area before the 2017 purchase of Time Warner Cable and merge into Spectrum, added TBN and all of its digital subchannels to its systems in the area beginning late August 2007, within the provider's digital family tier of channels. However, beyond must-carry situations where WWRS-DT1 must be carried on limited basic cable tiers in appropriate markets, the signal comes direct from TBN to the Spectrum headend, not through WWRS.

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

TBN-owned full-power stations permanently ceased analog transmissions on April 16, 2009. The station's digital signal continued to broadcasts on its pre-transition UHF channel 43, using virtual channel 52.

Must-carry

On April 1, 2002, a dispute arose between Time Warner Cable's Milwaukee-area system and WWRS regarding must-carry regulations. Must-carry regulations require cable television providers within the Grade B contour of a full-power, full service television station to carry that station on their basic tier. When the dispute was settled, the FCC judged that the station was not required to be carried on the cable systems in the more distant counties of Kenosha, Racine and Walworth. However, WWRS was able to exercise must-carry to the Time Warner Cable lineup in the immediate Milwaukee area. This, combined with the lack of available channel space, caused the forced move of Madison's PBS member and PBS Wisconsin flagship station WHA-TV (channel 21) to the digital cable tier in order to air WWRS on the basic cable tier.

References

1. "Facility Technical Data for WWRS-TV". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.
2. Pinsky, Mark. Liberal Reading of FCC Minority Rule Has Helped TBN's Growth, Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1989.
3. Christian TV network investing in new Brookfield production studio, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 5, 2009.
4. CITY OF BROOKFIELD REGULAR PLAN REVIEW BOARD
5. RabbitEars TV Query for WWRS
6. "DTV Tentative Channel Designations for the First and Second Rounds" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on August 29, 2013. Retrieved March 24, 2012.
7. "TV Station Information WWRS-TV". fcc.gov. Retrieved September 11, 2023.

External links

• Official website
• WWRS-TV on Facebook
• TBN.org/publicfile/WWRS/ (WWRS's public file)
• History of Milwaukee television

• Television stations in Madison, Wisconsin
• Television channels and stations established in 1997
• Television stations in Milwaukee
• 1997 establishments in Wisconsin
• Trinity Broadcasting Network stations
• Dodge County, Wisconsin