History
The station went on the air on July 31, 1955, under the special commitment of a VHF allotment made to Bluefield following the release of the Federal Communications Commission's Sixth Report and Order in 1952. Because of its proposed antenna height and location on East River Mountain, the channel 6 allocation in Bluefield was short-spaced to WATE-TV (also on channel 6) in Knoxville, Tennessee and side-spaced to WCYB-TV (on adjacent channel 5) in Bristol, Virginia. As a result, the proposed station on the channel 6 frequency would therefore be limited to one-half of the visual maximum effective radiated power, or 50,000 watts effective radiated power.
The station's original call letters were WHIS-TV, named for West Virginia politician Hugh Ike Shott. Shott died in 1953, two years before the station made it to air, and his heirs were channel 6's original owners. The Shott family controlled not only WHIS-TV but also an AM and FM radio station combination and the city's only daily newspaper, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. Although their media holdings in Bluefield were considered a monopoly by some, only the newspaper was a vehicle for their conservative political views. The Shotts constructed a privately-owned microwave relay system to receive NBC programming from WSLS-TV in Roanoke, Virginia, the closest city receiving network signals. On January 1, 1967, the WHIS stations moved into new facilities on Big Laurel Highway (U.S. Routes 19 and 460), known as "Broadcast Center," and began full color operations.
In 1975, the FCC decreed that a single company could not own all of the media outlets in one area, and required several small-market broadcast-print combinations to be broken up. The ruling forced the Shott family to break up their Bluefield media holdings. In 1979, after four years of litigation, the decision was made to sell the television station, which was sold to Quincy, Illinois-based Quincy Newspapers. After the sale was completed, the new owners changed the station's call letters to WVVA, which stands for the states which channel 6 serves, West Virginia and Virginia.
On February 17, 2009, WVVA switched to "Digital Nightlight" service on its analog signal showing information on the transition to exclusive digital television and its nightly 6 o'clock newscast. Post-transition digital operations continued on channel 46, which remaps to channel 6 through PSIP. The station's analog service was terminated altogether in late-April 2009.
WVVA currently has a construction permit for a digital fill-in translator on channel 43 from a transmitter near Layland. This will have the same call sign as the main signal and primarily serve the northern portion of the market.
Read more about this topic: WVVA
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