WPXS

Channel 13 at Mount Vernon—the last VHF television allocation in southern Illinois, added in 1970 after a years-long fight that depleted the resources of the aspiring station owners[2]—emerged as a bone of contention when the Southern Illinois Broadcasting Corporation, a subsidiary of Evans Broadcasting, was granted a construction permit in 1979.

However, opposition arose because Evans Broadcasting owned St. Louis independent station KDNL-TV and intended for channel 13 to repeat it 95 percent of the time.

[2] The landowner and others formed the Citizens Committee for Independent Local Television in Southern Illinois to oppose the grant of the permit.

It had segments of a 1,000 ft (300 m) tower waiting at a site near Salem when the FCC, responding to the Citizens Committee's appeals, rescinded the grant of the permit.

Its program schedule heavily emphasized programming of interest to southern Illinois viewers that St. Louis stations did not offer; channel 13 aired the Chicago White Sox, Chicago Cubs, and Illinois high school and college sports, and it started a local news department.

The station's signal is multiplexed: WPXS opted to build its digital transmitter in Saint Rose, Illinois, which is part of the St. Louis market.

The station's signal now covers areas of the St. Louis market east of the Mississippi River, including Belleville, Edwardsville and Alton, Illinois.

After the switchover, the broadcast radius of WPXS' digital signal covered a smaller area than the former analog signal, resulting in the loss of the station's reception to nearly 93,000 viewers in Effingham, Clay and Wayne counties and large portions of Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jasper, Richland and Shelby counties in Illinois.