WDPM-DT (channel 18) is a

religious television station Religious broadcasting, sometimes referred to as faith-based broadcasts, is the dissemination of television and/or radio content that intentionally has religious ideas, religious experience, or religious practice as its core focus. In some coun ...

licensed to

Mobile, Alabama Mobile ( , ) is a city and the county seat of Mobile County, Alabama, United States. The population was 187,041 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. After a successful vote to annex areas west of the city limits in July 2023, Mobil ...

, United States, serving southwest Alabama and northwest Florida as an

owned-and-operated station 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 network af ...

of the

Daystar Television Network The Daystar Television Network commonly known as Daystar Television or just Daystar, is an American evangelical Christian-based religious television network owned by the Word of God Fellowship, founded by Marcus Lamb in 1993. Daystar is headqu ...

. The station's transmitter is located near

Robertsdale, Alabama Robertsdale is a city in Baldwin County, Alabama Alabama ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Deep South, Deep Southern regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the north, Georg ...

History

The station signed on after the analog signal of

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

member station

WSRE WSRE (channel 23) is a PBS member television station in Pensacola, Florida, United States. It is owned by Pensacola State College (PSC), with studios located at the Kugelman Center for Telecommunications on the Pensacola State main campus, an ...

(channel 23) signed off for the last time on February 17, 2009. Since the "channel 23.1" series of

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 ...

designations already identifies the existing PBS station's

digital subchannel In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a method of transmitting more than one independent program stream simultaneously from the same digital radio or television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compress ...

s, this numbering sequence would not be available to the new station. According to the ATSC standard, WDPM-DT's channel numbers would therefore need to be displayed using numbering based on WSRE's digital channel number, 31.ATSC standard A/65C
, Annex 'B', Advanced Television Systems Committee, May 2006. From sign-on until February 2010, the station displayed as channel 4.1, which is considered a violation of these standards.

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— ...

References

2009 establishments in Alabama Daystar Television Network stations Television channels and stations established in 2009 DPM-DT {{Christian-org-stub