It was the first station in the Lehigh Valley, which at one point had three local UHF outlets (a fourth was planned but never reached the air).

[6] It was reported that "after many false starts" WLEV finally began broadcasting test patterns on April 21.

[7] WLEV was, from its beginning, an NBC affiliate and offered most, if not all, of that network's late afternoon and evening programming.

[9][10] The station would take to the airwaves in midafternoon, with the first scheduled show of the day typically beginning at 3 p.m. A short local newscast was aired in the 11 p.m. to midnight hour.

In much of eastern Pennsylvania, improvements in VHF transmitter technology and power, plus the establishment of tall towers at the Roxborough antenna farm, spelled doom for the UHF stations in Reading and the Lehigh Valley as more viewers tuned to the more powerful—and VHF—signals of Philadelphia's network stations from which they could now get better reception (and thus better pictures) on their TV sets.