The station originally planned to go on the air on September 1, 2001 as the UPN affiliate for the Quad Cities market. Although Northwest Television owned the station, operations were to have been handled by Second Generation of Iowa, owner of Fox affiliate KFXA in Cedar Rapids. However, Grant Broadcasting System II, then-owner of KLJB-TV and KGWB-TV, filed an petition to deny the application, and the construction permit was not granted until July 20, 2007—nearly a year after UPN closed down. WMWC never signed on an analog signal prior to June 12, 2009. As a result, when it took to the air on August 20, 2012, it became the first television station in the Quad Cities to have signed on as a digital-only station, more than three years after full-power stations ended analog broadcasts. On June 5, 2012, the station was assigned the call lettersWMWC. A TBN affiliate from its sign-on, WMWC was acquired from Northwest Television by the network in December 2012. On June 13, 2013, TBN added the "-TV" suffix to the station's callsign.
Digital television
Analog-to-digital conversion
Because it was granted an original construction permit after the FCC finalized the DTV allotment plan on April 21, 1997, the station did not receive a companion channel for a digital television station. Instead, at the end of the digital TV conversion period for full-service stations, WMWC would have been required to turn off its analog signal and turn on its digital signal. WMWC's original analog allocation was UHFchannel 67, though the application was subsequently amended to specify digital operation on channel 53; however, both channels were removed from the TV bandplan at the end of the digital television transition in the United States. Since WQAD-TV elected to stay on its pre-transition digital UHF channel 38 allocation after the digital transition, Northwest Television, the original owners of WMWC, elected WQAD's former analog channel allocation, VHFchannel 8, as the channel on which to broadcast WMWC's post-transition digital signal. As WQAD remaps to virtual channel 8 because of its former analog allocation, WMWC legally cannot keep the virtual channel mapping at 8; instead. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers will display the station's virtual channel as 53.
