The station is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company, and maintains offices on Des Plaines and Van Buren streets in the Chicago Loop; its transmitter is located atop the Willis Tower.
[5] Early progress was made when the antenna was placed atop the John Hancock Center in 1969,[6] and plans for a general-entertainment independent station and studios were broadly laid out in 1970.
[14] The next year, it struck a deal to move to a facility built out for the dismantled Catholic Television Network of Chicago on Wacker Drive, relocating from the Kemper Building.
The station also ran many Christian children's programs, including among others Joy Junction, Davey and Goliath, Bible Bowl, Sunshine Factory, Circle Square and Superbook, and re-runs of The Roy Rogers Show on Saturday afternoons.
[18] In January 1998, Paxson Communications struck a deal to purchase WCFC—started in 1976 for just $850,000—for $120 million, with the proceeds from the sale being used to start the Total Living Network (which then began to be carried on WCFC-LP in Rockford, which had been WCFC-TV translator W51CD, as well as KTLN-TV in San Francisco).
[19][20] Upon Pax's launch on August 31, 1998, the call letters were changed to WCPX (the television station in Orlando formerly known as WCPX had changed its call sign to WKMG-TV earlier in the year), and the Christian lineup was cut back to 5 a.m. to 12 p.m. daily to accommodate Pax programming, which aired from 12 p.m. to midnight, and programming from The Worship Network during the overnight hours.
WCPX Positive Living airs Tuesday mornings at 5 a.m., and The Calumet Roundtable, produced by students and faculty of the Communication & Creative Arts department at Purdue University Calumet in the Northwest Indiana suburbs, airs Thursday mornings at 5 and 5:30 a.m. During the time NBC was a partner in Pax TV, WCPX carried an encore presentation of WMAQ-TV (channel 5)'s 10 p.m. newscast at 10:30 p.m. before the dissolution of that agreement in the summer of 2005.
The station's signal is multiplexed: On April 2, 2009, WCPX officially began broadcasting Ion Television programming in high definition (available in the 720p resolution format).