WCTE


WCTE, virtual and UHF digital channel 22, is a Public Broadcasting Service member television station licensed to Cookeville, Tennessee, United States and serving the Upper Cumberland region. The station is owned by the Upper Cumberland Broadcast Council. WCTE's studios are located on the campus of Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, and its transmitter is located northwest of Monterey, Tennessee. Although Cookeville is part of the Nashville market, the station also serves the western fringe of the Knoxville market.

History

WCTE first signed on the air on August 21, 1978. It was the last in a series of stations launched by the Tennessee Department of Education over a 12-year period, finally bringing public television to the last remaining part of the state that previously had little or no access to it. Some of the western parts of the viewing area could pick up the signal of Nashville's WDCN when it broadcast on channel 2 from 1962 to 1973, but WDCN's move to the weaker channel 8 in 1973 left most of the territory without PBS service for five years.
In 1984, the state relinquished WCTE and its other stations to community boards, such as the UCBC.
The station, like its former sister stations WLJT, WSJK and WTCI, emphasizes programming of local interest in addition to carrying a full schedule of PBS programs. The community programming is particularly important because, being a rural, relatively isolated area, the Upper Cumberlands gets little or no coverage from commercial broadcasters in Nashville or Knoxville, the two major media markets nearest the area.
For some time after the DTV transition in 2009, WCTE broadcast with an effective radiated power of 57 kW with an antenna height of 412 meters. Then, a early in 2011 increased ERP to 200 kW with an antenna height of 425 meters.
WCTE's is receivable in central Tennessee and in some adjoining parts of southern central Kentucky.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
22.11080iWCTE-DTMain WCTE programming / PBS
22.2480iWorldWorld
22.3480iCreateCreate
22.4480i16:9KidsPBS Kids

Analog-to-digital conversion

WCTE shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 22, 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 signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 52, which was among the high band UHF channels that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to its former analog-era UHF channel 22.