KWDK (channel 56) is a religious television station licensed to

Tacoma, Washington Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, southwest of Bellevue, Washington, Bellevue, northeast of the state capital, Olympia ...

, United States, broadcasting the Daystar Television Network to the

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

area. The station is

owned and operated In the broadcasting industry, an owned-and-operated station (frequently abbreviated as an O&O) usually refers to a television or radio station owned by the network with which it is associated. This distinguishes such a station from an affiliate ...

by Community Television Educators, Inc., a subsidiary of Daystar parent company Word of God Fellowship. KWDK's transmitter is located on West Tiger Mountain near Issaquah.

History

On July 17, 1992, the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains j ...

(FCC) issued a

construction permit Planning permission or building permit refers to the approval needed for construction or expansion (including significant renovation), and sometimes for demolition, in some jurisdictions. House building permits, for example, are subject to bu ...

for channel 56 and call letters KWDK, to Christopher J. Racine. The license of the unbuilt station was sold to Puget Sound Educational TV, Inc. on October 6, 1999. KWDK signed on the air September 6, 2000, broadcasting the Daystar network. KWDK was not the first station to broadcast on channel 56 in Tacoma. The Clover Park School District used the allocation to broadcast from Lakewood as public television station KPEC-TV from April 1960 to January 1976. It was effectively replaced when the school board purchased the transmitter facility and license of KTVW, a commercial station on VHF channel 13 in Tacoma, and moved its operation there as

KCPQ KCPQ (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Tacoma, Washington, United States, serving the Seattle area. It is owned and operated by the Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox network through its Fox Television Stations division alongside KZJ ...

in January 1976, shuttering the less powerful channel 56. The school board then sold the station in 1980, at which time it reverted to private commercial broadcasting. On April 22, 2005, KWDK filed an application with the FCC for authorization to cease analog broadcasting and surrender its license for channel 56 prior to the end of the digital TV transition period, and thereafter operate KWDK-DT as a single channel, digital-only television station on channel 42. The FCC granted this authorization on July 20, 2005. KWDK apparently ceased analog broadcasting on channel 56 sometime in April 2006. In August 2006, it was verified to be broadcasting on digital channel 42, making KWDK-DT the first digital-only broadcaster in the Seattle–Tacoma market, three years before all analog signals on full power TV stations were discontinued.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is

multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource— ...

Analog-to-digital conversion

KWDK shut down its analog signal, over

UHF Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter ...

channel 56, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated from analog to digital television.List of Digital Full-Power Stations
The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 42, using

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered as digits on a receiver's ...

56.

References

2000 establishments in Washington (state) Daystar Television Network stations Television channels and stations established in 2000 WDK {{Washington-tv-station-stub