Prior license history

The first television station in northwest Indiana was WCAE, a noncommercial station owned by the Lake Central School Corporation in St. John, which broadcast on UHF channel 50 from September 26, 1967, to March 31, 1983. The station was closed when financial troubles prompted the school board to pull its subsidy, ceasing channel 50's operations.

Becoming WYIN

Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, a group that consisted of former WCAE advisory board members who had split from the school board in 1978, bought the WCAE license in late 1983 and set out to reactivate it. In a convoluted transaction that had as its purpose the construction of a new TV station in Chicago, Metrowest Corporation (owned by Fred Eychaner) paid NIPB $684,000 to join its plan to switch the noncommercial and commercial statuses of Gary's two TV channel allocations, channels 50 and 56. Metrowest had bought a majority stake in the permitholder of WDAI, a commercial station on channel 56; however, channel 56 could not be built from the Sears Tower, while channel 50 could. The payment allowed NIPB to access matching federal grants to construct its own facilities. Metrowest eventually took channel 50 to air as commercial station WPWR-TV (now a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station). The WCAE non-commercial license that was now reassigned to channel 56 was reconstructed by NIPB who signed the station on the air as WYIN on November 15, 1987.

For many years, WYIN fought to try to replace its aging transmitter and build a new tower atop either the Sears Tower or the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago. Its plans, and any floated by WYCC, were bitterly opposed by Window to the World Communications, which used their position as a national programming provider for PBS to turn back any attempts at competition from the two stations all being on an equal platform and transmitter position and power. WYIN pays a lower license fee for its carriage of PBS programs. WTTW station management claimed that if WYIN was allowed to transmit from Sears or the Hancock, it would retain that lower cost for PBS programming, leaving WTTW at a disadvantage as well as taking valuable pledge donations from the station.

In the face of continued objections from WTTW, WYIN opted instead to build a new transmitter tower in Cedar Lake, Indiana. In November 2003, the station erected a 950-foot (290 m) transmission tower at its existing transmitter site, near Crown Point, which increased the station's power to 1.35 million watts.

Subchannels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Subchannel history

Analog-to-digital conversion

WYIN began transmitting a digital signal on UHF channel 17 in February 2004, following the securement of a $2 million grant from the Indiana General Assembly; the digital transmission antenna was placed on its then-recently completed transmitter facility near Crown Point.

WYIN shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 56, on June 12, 2009, the official date on 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 17.^[8] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 56, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.