WQEX
Immediately after the directors of WENS met on August 27, 1957, and decided to shutter the station, a delegation contacted WQED and offered the facilities to channel 13.[2]
WQED purchased the WENS physical plant in 1958.[3] Channel 22 was assigned to Pittsburgh from Clarksburg, West Virginia, in 1958, allowing for the re-designation of channel 16 as noncommercial.[4]
WQED filed for a new construction permit, which was awarded in November 1958, and restarted the station, renamed WQEX, on March 23, 1959.[5] WQED and WQEX formed the first legal television duopoly—at the time permitted only among noncommercial television stations—in the country.[6] In order to allow schools to receive WQEX programs, WQED sent out a public plea soliciting donations of unused UHF converters owned by the public.[7]
WQEX went dark again in November 1961 but returned to the air over a year later, in January 1963, after technical repairs were made.[9] For much of its early years, owing to its educational status and the first-generation UHF equipment it inherited from WENS, the station was plagued by a weak signal, operating at 171 kilowatts visual, and 34.2 kilowatts aural by 1971, resulting in a Grade B signal over most of Pittsburgh. Viewers in the city's outlying suburbs that were unable to receive the station clearly on cable received a spotty-to-non-existent signal. In effect, the station was perceived by the general public as an afterthought.
WQEX was the last station in Pittsburgh, and probably the last in North America, to convert to color. For decades, the station had broadcast with WENS's black-and-white transmitter. However, on March 10, 1985,[10] the transmitter broke down completely, and the parts required to fix it were no longer available. WQED decided to take the station completely silent, and channel 13 launched a pledge drive to raise the $4.5 million necessary to reconstruct the channel 16 facility.
The new WQEX was set up as an almost autonomous station within the WQED organization. A new, more powerful NEC color transmitter was installed for testing over the summer of 1986 at an authorized power increase to 660 kW visual, and 66 kW aural. WQEX took over Studio C in the WQED premises and built its entire studio, offices and technical space within the 28-by-32-foot area. It took six months from April 1, 1986, until launch on October 16, 1986, to build the station, train the personnel and organize the programming, all of this under the direction of Kenneth Tiven as general manager. The result was a station unlike any other in the PBS system, technically and in programming.
The new WQEX was then one of the most automated stations in the world. It adopted the Betacart player for airing all of its programs—even programs longer than the 30-minute recording limit of the format; the programs were spread across overlapping tapes. Local programming by its competitors had been delivered on film, reel videotape and U-matic videocassettes. The Betacam professional format produced a high-quality picture with crisp on-air resolution. In addition, the station used a database system for program playout, which controlled the Betacart machine.[11]
In its return to the air, WQEX's schedule resembled that of a commercial independent station, with themed nights, reruns, movies and British situation comedies (often called "Britcoms"), reflecting a move then by some PBS stations to adopt a more "middlebrow" image appealing to a larger audience than those of cultural and educational-minded viewers (and thus potentially generating more donor income). The station even had on-camera hosts.[12]
From 1986 through 1990, the station's idiosyncratic persona stayed intact. It produced a 10 p.m. news program from Monday through Friday, in conjunction with the reporting staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper; reporters were debriefed about their stories, and these video clips were then played back in the Betacart automation system as a complete program. This innovation, called "modular production," later became the keystone of several television news channels, including the now-defunct Orange County Newschannel (OCN), which Tiven departed WQEX to start in 1990.[13]
When funding became tight in the mid-1990s due to economic and political changes from the early years of public broadcasting, WQED began using WQEX to simulcast its own programming as of November 1, 1997, to cut expenses; some of the programming formerly exclusive to WQEX was consolidated into the WQED lineup at that time.[14]
