WIWN

WIWN (channel 68) is a television station licensed to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, United States (in the Green Bay market), but primarily serving the Milwaukee area.

Owned by Family Worship Center Church of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the station maintains a transmitter on North Humboldt Boulevard in Milwaukee's Estabrook Park neighborhood.

Most of the station's audience prior to 2007 received its signal over-the-air, as WWAZ and Pappas had previously not pursued any must-carry provisions with local cable and national satellite providers because of affiliation uncertainties; for instance, the station was not carried on the Charter Communications system in Fond du Lac.

However, this changed in mid-2007, when Pappas filed a must-carry provision with Time Warner Cable's Northeastern Wisconsin system, and the station was subsequently added in Green Bay and the Fox Cities on June 26, 2007,[4] replacing Milwaukee CW affiliate WVTV (channel 18), which had aired on the provider since the mid-1980s during that station's phase of becoming a superstation with intrastate coverage across Wisconsin.

The petition to move was contested by Weigel Broadcasting, WLFM-LP (now WRME-LD) in Chicago (a station using the analog channel 6 audio overlap quirk on 87.7 FM to broadcast a smooth jazz radio station with video imagery; it now by coincidence carries a Weigel-programmed oldies format spun off from their MeTV network and an ATSC 3.0 signal with Jewelry Television), as well as by Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, which has its Kalamazoo PBS member station WGVK based on digital channel 5, mapping to virtual channel 52.

Weigel objected mainly on concerns of abandonment by WWAZ of serving Fond du Lac and the surrounding area to become a full-time Milwaukee station (creating a possible competitor to Weigel's two full-power and two low-power stations in the area), while Grand Valley's and WLFM's concerns were with interference from the more southern signal within Chicago and across Lake Michigan.

The application was approved mainly due to ABC asking for the FCC to allow them to move the main digital signal of its Chicago owned-and-operated station WLS-TV from VHF channel 7 to UHF channel 44 due to signal reception problems in their market, a move supported by Pappas and approved by the FCC in October 2009, which was carried out at the beginning of 2010.

Pappas planned to address the abandonment concerns of the rural audience by building two low-power digital translator stations in areas formerly served by the WWAZ analog signal, the first on channel 15 from Ripon which has reception in the city of Fond du Lac, and the second on channel 30, broadcasting from Columbus within the northeast reaches of the Madison market.

[10] However the Ripon and Columbus applications have since disappeared from the FCC database, leaving solely the entry for the Milwaukee tower site.

The same day, a second subchannel carrying paid programming was also added; eventually this channel picked up the shopping network Evine Live as a permanent affiliation.

In late November 2015, a fourth subchannel carrying the bilingual LATV network was added, along with a downscaling of the main channel to 720p, which is Sonlife's default transmission format.

[17] On March 11, 2022, WIWN filed a petition with the FCC to move its RF channel from low-VHF 5 to high-VHF 7, and to add a second distributed transmission system transmitter serving Fond du Lac County proper from north of St.

[1][18] On November 21, 2023, it was announced that WIWN would be sold to Jimmy Swaggart and Sonlife itself, through the Family Worship Center Church, for $8.9 million;[2] the sale was completed on January 24, 2024.