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GRAND RAPIDS - Grand Valley State University's WGVU-TV may have been one of the latest arrivals to the digital age, but the public television station hopes that it will have the most local impact.
According to information from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Congress has determined that broadcast television must eventually convert to digital operation. With that in mind, the FCC began an initiative to hurry along the process to free up the current analog bandwidth for other users, like emergency responders.
When the public TV stations also known as "noncommercial educational television stations" were told that their digital facilities must be constructed by
May 1, 2003, it was bad news for the nation's PBS carriers.
Much of public stations' operating revenues is derived from donation drives and few had the extra funds needed to launch the costly capital investment required by the unfunded mandate.
WGVU filed for an extension, and the deadline came and went.
Since then, the station has erected a digital transmitter and has begun broadcasting the digital television (DTV) signals,...