Update on Channel 5 in the Keweenaw

Hello everyone, Kenn Baynard here again to give you an update on what’s going on with channel 5. As most of you have noticed it went dark on June 11th as we were preparing to turn off our analog transmitter and turn on the digital transmitter, and we had a few snags along the way. The transmitter itself is fine, but some of the supporting hardware that delivers the signal from a tower in Houghton out to Painsdale where our tower is located turned out to be faulty, and we’ve had to send it in for repairs. We could not turn the analog transmitter back on because we were too far into the switch-over process, and would have had to turn it off on June 12th anyways, per the FCC’s rules.

We’re working as fast as we can to get it back on the air, but it’s currently out of our hands until we get that unit repaired or replaced.

Others may have noticed we were on and off quite a bit this week on Charter cable, and other smaller cable outlets. Hopefully we’ve resolved those problems once and for all, and it should be smooth sailing from now on. With all of this new technology, while we expect everything to work perfectly right out of the box, sometimes it tends to have other plans. We did, however, get WBUP, channel 10 up and running at full DTV power this week, which we’re very excited about.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding while we continue with our transition to DTV.

Kenn Baynard

Operations Manager