WSEC
WSEC, virtual channel 14, is a Public Broadcasting Service member television station licensed to Jacksonville, Illinois, United States. Owned by Southern Illinois University, it is a sister station to WSIU-TV in Carbondale. WSEC's transmitter is located south of Franklin, Illinois; master control and most internal operations are based on the SIU campus in Carbondale.
A digital translator located in Springfield, W08DP, broadcasts on VHF channel 8 for full coverage in that metropolitan area. WSEC also operates two full-time satellites, WMEC in Macomb and WQEC in Quincy. WMEC's transmitter is located near Colchester, while WQEC's transmitter is on Ellington Road northeast of Quincy.
The three-station network serves as the PBS member for the Quincy television market, as well as the western portion of the Champaign–Springfield–Decatur market. It serves a large and mostly rural area of western Illinois, northeastern Missouri and southeastern Iowa.
History
Educational television in Illinois
After World War II, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign hosted the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. The NAEB, based in Urbana, Illinois from 1951 until 1961, was created to establish broadcast allocations of AM and FM radio and TV channels for non-commercial educational programming. The Rockefeller Foundation funded two-week seminars in 1949 and 1950 for 22 educational broadcasters from across the United States. The meetings established the foundation for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.Educational consortium
and the West Central Illinois Educational Telecommunications Corporation was incorporated on February 9, 1976. Its mission was "to establish an educational television network, provide educational content, create local and public affairs programming to serve the residents and businesses of west-central Illinois". Bylaws for the corporation were approved on January 13, 1984.Former UNC-TV general manager George Hall was appointed its first president that year.
Initial engineering design and FCC application filings were performed in 1977 and 1978 by Gary Breed and Don Markley in Peoria., and Markley grew up in Ipava.
The D. L. Markley design was a balance of engineering, economics, and the service region of the education institution members in the largely rural west-central Illinois region. Larger urban areas in the region were considered crucial for ongoing community support and sufficient financial support to cover operational costs of the non-commercial educational network.
West Central Illinois Educational TV Network was presented to regional representatives, educational institutions, major businesses, civic and community organizations in 1977 and 1978:
| Station | City of license | NTSC Channels TV / RF | First air date | Call letters' meaning | ERP | HAAT | Facility ID | Convocom educational member | Transmitter Site Coordinates |
| WTVP | Peoria | 47 | Tele Vision Peoria | 190 kW | 28311 | Bradley University | |||
| WQPT | Moline | 24 | Quad Cities Public Television | 80 kW | 5468 | Black Hawk College | |||
| WSEC1 | Jacksonville | 14 | 1979 1 ' | Springfield Educational Consortium | Sangamon State University | ||||
| WMEC-TV | Macomb | 22 | Macomb Educational Consortium | 75 kW | Western Illinois University | ||||
| WQEC2 | Quincy | 27 | Quincy Educational C'''onsortium | 58.6 kW |
Notes:
- 1. WJPT planned to use the WJJY-TV tower at Bluffs, Illinois. That tower collapsed on March 26, 1978, in an ice storm. A new tower site west of Waverly was selected and began broadcasting August 11, 1984.
- 2. WQEC was added to the original design in 1979 since the new WJPT tower at 800 to 1,000 feet would not provide coverage to the Quincy and Hannibal market.
Convocom
Construction of a new tower was completed in 1980 and WIUM's transmitters were relocated to the site in 1981. Two microwave relay towers were constructed in 1983 between Peoria and Quincy at Cuba, Illinois, and Carthage, Illinois, for master control, PBS program feeds, local program feeds, and TV studios at WIU in Macomb and at WGEM-TV in Quincy.
By 1983, a site west of Waverly was selected as the site for an tower for WJPT. However, for reasons that remain unknown, the FCC only licensed WJPT for 34 kilowatts of broadcast power at that specific location. As a result, WJPT only had a fringe signal in Springfield, leaving it all but unviewable in the capital except on cable. A site east of Quincy owned by Blackhawk of Quincy, Inc. was selected for a new tower for WQEC. Convocom had to raise $5.5 million to complete construction of these planned and unplanned replacement facilities.
George Hall resigned as President of Convocom in 1982 to serve as Virginia's Director of Telecommunications under Governor Chuck Robb. The consortium appointed Dr. Jerold Gruebel as the Executive Director of Convocom in April 1983. Dr. Grubel had previously served as the assistant director of Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System —a statewide network of video, voice, and data networks connecting all 77 of Indiana's colleges and universities with headquarters in Indianapolis.
WQPT in Moline signed on November 2, 1983, to serve the Quad Cities metropolitan area, east-central Iowa, and northwestern Illinois through a translator in Sterling, Illinois. WQPT, owned and operated by Black Hawk College, elected to develop its own brand identity for the Quad Cities market and never joined the Convocom microwave network and control facilities in Peoria as originally envisioned in the 1970s design. Western Illinois University-Quad Cities assumed ownership of WQPT in 2010 and began a series of capital improvements. On June 30, 2014, the master control for WQPT was migrated and centralized at WTVP in Peoria, as envisioned in the original 1970s D.L. Markley & Associates design.
WJPT in Jacksonville signed on August 11, 1984, to serve the western portion of the Champaign–Springfield–Decatur market and south-central Illinois. This gave the central Illinois region the distinction of being served by two separately programmed PBS stations since WILL-TV in Urbana continued to serve as the PBS outlet for the eastern half of the market. Springfield is assigned to the Champaign–Springfield–Decatur market by Nielsen Designated Market Area and the FCC Television Market Area since the 1950s.
WQEC in Quincy signed on March 9, 1985, covering Hannibal and Quincy, western Illinois, northeastern Missouri, and southeastern Iowa.
Smaller network and change in mission
In 1998, to address reception problems in Springfield from WSEC at Waverly, a 1,400-watt translator was built in the city, originally broadcasting on channel 65 as W65BV. Previously, Springfield viewers could only get an acceptable signal via cable and satellite. This translator was moved to VHF channel 8 in 2001 and became W08DP.On July 21, 2000, the FCC granted a new main studio waiver to relocate the master control and technical and engineering facilities from Peoria to Chatham, southwest of Springfield.
Transition to digital television
In 1998, the FCC mandated that broadcast stations migrate from analog to digital television transmission in the United States. This had the effect of imposing an unfunded federal mandate on public television stations. Since 1993, auctions of former television spectrum to the wireless telephone and broadband service companies by the FCC generated $52 billion.For comparison, Iowa Public Television, which operates a statewide television and telecommunications network with nine high-power digital transmitters and eight translators, spent $47,000,000 to complete the digital television conversion. That capital expenditure was financially supported by the State of Iowa, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. More than 1,000,000 viewers watch IPTV each week. Contributing membership to the IPTV Foundation consists of approximately 55,000 households.
The television tower for WQEC in Quincy, erected in 1984 by Convocom, was sold by Network Knowledge to Clearview Tower on January 5, 2011 On February 14, 2014, Clearview Tower sold this tower site to K2 Tower.
The network's geographic service region is now defined by the three broadcast facilities at Franklin, Macomb, and Quincy.
Financial challenges
As predicted in the 1970s, the smaller geographical service region of three broadcast facilities presented financial challenges for all participants.In May 2001, the State of Illinois granted Convocom almost $1 million for the digital conversion. Despite the early success, Dr. Jerold Gruebel, president and CEO of Network Knowledge said, "the organization first ran into financial trouble in 2002, due to unfunded federal mandates to convert to digital television". Network Knowledge raised more than $15 million to fund the conversion but was forced to borrow nearly $5 million to pay the rest of the bill.
In January 2008, WTVP in Peoria faced financial difficulties after their digital television upgrade and studio relocation from Bradley University, an original member of the Convocom consortium, to a new Peoria riverfront studio and offices. A special campaign, Save Our Station, generated thousands of special contributions and led to an agreement with the bank.
An experimental collaboration involving joint management and operational cooperation of WTVP with WILL-TV and the University of Illinois worked well enough that the WTVP Board of Directors voted in December 2013 to extend this cooperative agreement for an additional three years. The overall purpose of the agreement was to help both public broadcasting stations operate more cost-effectively in serving eastern and central Illinois.
In July 2008, WQPT, owned by Black Hawk College, an original member of the Convocom consortium, lost financial support when the station was removed from the college's FY2009 fiscal budget.
In May 2010, WQPT was sold to Western Illinois University-Quad Cities, with the primary objective to return WQPT to its original mission of creating more local and public affairs programming. The station moved from its longtime home on Black Hawk's campus to new studios and offices in Riverfront Hall on the WIU-QC Campus on July 1, 2014.
In contrast, Friends of Iowa Public Television was created in 1970 for the development, growth, and support through building a strong statewide membership base. Its 65,000 member households across Iowa and bordering states contributed nearly 90 percent of the out-of-pocket costs for acquiring and producing general audience programming.
In 2009, Network Knowledge also lost its grant support. The organization received an annual average of $750,000 from three foundations in Quincy and one foundation in Decatur. Due to their own economic shortfalls, Gruebel said, none of these organizations gave grants to the network.
In 2016, the network announced major cutbacks in over-the-air broadcasting times to save money due to the Illinois state budget stand-off, along with other cuts from donors and production contracts. Starting on May 6, 2016, the network broadcast from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends.
Sale to SIU
On November 29, 2018, West Central Illinois Educational Telecommunications Corporation announced that it had sold the three Network Knowledge stations to Southern Illinois University, which operates WSIU-FM-TV in Carbondale, as well as its associated satellites, for $1.5 million. The deal took effect on November 1; longtime network president and CEO Jerold Gruebel gave up station management on November 1 and switched from full-time to part-time work about a month later. The sale was part of a larger partnership between Network Knowledge and WSIU that had been announced on October 26 in hopes of preserving public television in western and central Illinois. A State Journal-Register story said that views wouldn't notice a difference in program quality, but that viewers in the Network Knowledge territory would gain access to more national PBS programming., the old network website https://networkknowledge.tv/ redirected to WSEC's schedule page on WSIU's site but the stations still maintained a slightly different schedule from WSIU-TV.
Programming
Local programming
Network Knowledge produces several regularly scheduled programs each month, including:- Cardia
- CapitolView
- Illinois Stories
- InLife: Stories from Western Illinois
- Lawmakers
- Expedition United Kingdom
- Expedition Scotland
- Expedition United Kingdom
- Building Stories
- Making Conversation; Downtown Springfield Inc. Annual Awards; Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce Annual Gala
Digital television
Digital channels
The stations' digital signals are multiplexed:| Channel | Video | Aspect | PSIP Short Name | Programming |
| x.1 | 720p | WMEC-DT WQEC-DT WSEC-DT | Main programming / PBS | |
| x.2 | 480i | WMEC-D2 WQEC-D2 WSEC-D2 | World and other programming | |
| x.3 | 480i | WMEC-D3 WQEC-D3 WSEC-D3 | Create | |
| x.4 | 480i | WMEC-D4 WQEC-D4 WSEC-D4 | PBS Kids |
Analog-to-digital conversion
During 2009, in the lead-up to the analog-to-digital television transition that would ultimately occur on June 12, Network Knowledge shut down the analog transmitters of its stations on a staggered basis. The dates each analog transmitter ceased operation as well as their post-transition channel allocations are:- WMEC shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 22, on February 17, 2009, the original target date in which full-power television in the United States was to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 21. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 22.
- WQEC shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 27, on February 17, 2009. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 34. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 27.
- WSEC shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 14, 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 remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 15. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 14.