In Milwaukee
According to FCC records, Sheboygan Community Broadcasting sold the station on November 23, 2009, to Polnet Communications, which provides ethnic programming in Polish and other languages and owns several ethnic radio stations in the Chicago area, and formerly had a time-lease arrangement for Polish language television programming on WCIU-DT6 in Chicago before launching their own station in the area in 2010, WPVN-CA (channel 24). Polnet planned to air "quality ethnic programming", according to their FCC statements, but never actually broadcast any programming as its entire twelve-year ownership period had them struggle to build out the station's permanent digital facilities.
A construction permit for channel 36 from the Milwaukee PBS Tower in Milwaukee was contested by Milwaukee PBS (then branded as MPTV) itself, which asserted their existing analog rights from WMVT being on analog channel 36 to place a digital translator station for WMVS there to address inefficiencies with WMVS's digital channel 8 signal in Milwaukee proper. Polnet subsequently withdrew the application for 36 and petitioned for a digital application on channel 30 in early December 2009, also from the Milwaukee PBS Tower. The placement of the station's transmitter in Milwaukee likely meant that Polnet did not intend to keep any kind of service to Sheboygan, and the placement of the analog tower in Random Lake was solely intended to "skip" the station down to Milwaukee, a move allowed under FCC regulations.
On April 9, 2010, the station was reclassified as a low-power station, and took the lettered calls WPVS-LP. On January 3, 2011, the FCC authorized the change of city of license from Sheboygan to Milwaukee[5] with a license expiration of December 2013. The station's license was to expire on December 1, 2021; it has continued to operate under 'silent and licensed' authority from the FCC, with occasional operation from the rented Random Lake site to maintain the license while it looks to permanently operate from the Milwaukee PBS Tower.
On July 31, 2018, HC2 Holdings announced it would purchase WPVS-LP for $400,000, and in the interim a new construction permit for VHF channel 9 from the Milwaukee PBS tower has been filed (HC2 had filed a purchase agreement for WPVN in Chicago two months before[6]). This would have had WPVS-LP become a sister station to WTSJ-LP (channel 38).[7][8] However, the sale never closed and it remained owned by Polvision past the July 13, 2021, deadline to build permanent digital facilities, and the station was under a perpetual cycling of tolling and special temporary authority requests to remain silent throughout the late 2010s into 2021.
On November 3, 2021, it was announced that SagamoreHill Broadcasting would purchase WPVS-LP for $100,000 under subsidiary Roseland Broadcasting;[9] the sale was completed on June 29, 2022.[10]
The station was licensed for digital operation on channel 9 effective January 14, 2022. As of October 2023, the station broadcasts four subchannels, with the main channel carrying a network of unknown origin called SportStak. Before the end of 2023, when it began to map channels by its originally intended physical channel of 29, it had mapped its channels from channel 9.2 for its physical channel, presumably to avoid any confusion with Chicago's WGN-TV. Its station identification also erroneously identifies WXON-LD, a low-power television station in Flint, Michigan, which is also on RF channel 9, but is not owned by SagamoreHill itself.
The station changed its callsign to WWMW-LD as of April 29, 2024.[11] At the start of July 2024, the station's manager, Roseland Broadcasting, launched a centrist/moderate political news channel, Purple TV, across both WWMW and its Madison sister station, WMWI-LD on its main channel, timed with the 2024 Republican National Convention taking place in Milwaukee, and with it, another virtual channel change back to its second Sheboygan-era channel of 16 took place.[12]
