Blue Ridge PBS
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| Southwestern Virginia United States |
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|---|---|
| Branding | Blue Ridge PBS |
| Slogan | Your Community Resource for Lifelong Learning |
| Channels | Digital: see chart |
| Subchannels | xx.1 PBS xx.2 PBS Encore/PBS World xx.3 PBS Kids |
| Affiliations | PBS |
| Owner | Blue Ridge Public Television, Inc. |
| First air date | August 1, 1967 |
| Call letters' meaning | see table below |
| Former affiliations | NET (1967–1970) |
| Transmitter power | see table below |
| Height | see table below |
| Class | see table below |
| Facility ID | see table below |
| Transmitter coordinates | see table below |
| Licensing authority | FCC |
| Public license information: |
Ridge PBS Profile Ridge PBS CDBS |
| Website | www.blueridgepbs.org/ |
Blue Ridge PBS is the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member station for southwestern Virginia. It serves the Roanoke-Lynchburg market from studios in Roanoke. It formerly also broadcast to the Tri-Cities, Tennessee-Virginia market.
The primary station, WBRA-TV (channel 15) in Roanoke signed on for the first time on August 1, 1967. It claims to be the first all-color educational station in the country. It was originally a member of National Educational Television (NET), before that organization was replaced by PBS in 1970.
Over the years, WBRA established two satellite transmitters — WSBN-TV (channel 47) in Norton was activated in 1971 and WMSY-TV (channel 52) in Marion began operations in 1981. WSBN brought a city-grade PBS signal to the Tri-Cities for the first time; it is carried on the Tri-Cities DirecTV and Dish Network feeds.
In the 1980s, WBRA began identifying on-air as Blue Ridge Public Television, due of its location near the Blue Ridge Mountains. On February 19, 2007, it changed its on-air name to Blue Ridge PBS, though WBRA-TV remains the official call sign.
In March 2013, Blue Ridge PBS announced that it would close both WSBN and WMSY by June 30, 2013, leaving East Tennessee PBS outlet WETP as the sole source of PBS programming in the Tri-Cities. The move came as a result of budget cuts that followed the elimination of Virginia's funding for public broadcasting stations in 2012. However, station president James Baum told The Roanoke Times that there are no plans to tear down the transmitters, leaving the possibility that WSBN and WMSY could return in the future.
Note:
The digital signals of Blue Ridge PBS' stations are multiplexed:
47.2
52.2
WMSY-SD (on WMSY and WSBN)
Blue Ridge PBS' stations shut down their analog signals on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital channel allocations post-transition are as follows:
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Wikipedia