WQCW
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Portsmouth, Ohio Charleston/Huntington, West Virginia United States |
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| Branding | Tri-State's CW |
| Channels |
Digital: 17 (UHF) Virtual: 30 (PSIP) |
| Affiliations | The CW |
| Owner |
Gray Television (Gray Television Licensee, LLC) |
| Founded | December 5, 1984 |
| First air date | October 1998 |
| Call letters' meaning |
Quality television The CW |
| Sister station(s) | WSAZ-TV |
| Former callsigns | WHCP (1998–2006) |
| Former channel number(s) |
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| Former affiliations | |
| Transmitter power | 1,000 kW Non-Directional |
| Height | 396 m |
| Facility ID | 65130 |
| Transmitter coordinates | 38°30′21″N 82°12′33″W / 38.50583°N 82.20917°W |
| Licensing authority | FCC |
| Public license information: |
Profile CDBS |
| Website | www.tristatescw.com |
WQCW, UHF digital channel 17 (virtual channel 30), is the CW affiliate for the Huntington/Charleston, West Virginia television market. The station is owned and operated by Gray Television as part of a duopoly with NBC affiliate WSAZ-TV. It is licensed to Portsmouth, Ohio and is the one of two commercial stations in the market licensed outside of West Virginia. Its transmitter is now located in Milton, West Virginia on the WOWK tower.
Although a construction permit was issued for channel 30 in 1984 under the calls WUXA, no station signed on this channel until 1998, when WHCP signed on as an affiliate of The WB. It added UPN programming in 2000 after it was dropped from WVAH-TV, airing it off-pattern on weekends and after WB network time.
The station's analog transmitter, despite its over 2 million-watt ERP, was not strong enough to cover the entire Huntington/Charleston market, even though it identifies itself on-air as "Portsmouth-Charleston." The market, the largest geographic market east of the Mississippi River, covers 61 counties in central West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio. Most of this territory is a very rugged dissected plateau, making UHF reception difficult. WVAH faced similar problems when it originally signed on in 1982 on channel 23, forcing it to move to channel 11 in 1988. WHCP did not have that recourse, and could not increase their analog station's power due to probable interference with digital television stations in Roanoke, Virginia and Knoxville, Tennessee. Shortly after going on the air, it signed on two low-power satellites--WBWV-LP channel 69 in Huntington and WOWB-LP channel 53 in Charleston. The station effectively depended on cable and satellite for most of its viewership, which is all but essential for acceptable television in much of this vast market—especially in Eastern Kentucky. Dish Network had carried the station since it began offering a local Huntington/Charleston feed, with DirecTV following suit on January 25, 2006. The station began to be carried in high definition on DirecTV on November 9, 2010, with Dish following on March 7, 2012.
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