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City | Fort Pierce, Florida |
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Ownership | |
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History | |
First air date | May 9, 1990 |
Former call signs | WTCE (1990–2005) |
Former channel number(s) |
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Call sign meaning | Treasure Coast Educational Television |
Technical information[1] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
Facility ID | 29715 |
ERP | 730 kW |
HAAT | 297 m (974 ft) |
Transmitter coordinates | 27°1′32″N 80°10′41.9″W / 27.02556°N 80.178306°W |
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Public license information |
WTCE-TV (channel 21) is a religious television station licensed to Fort Pierce, Florida, United States, serving as the West Palm Beach–area outlet for the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). It is owned and operated by TBN's Community Educational Television subsidiary, which manages stations in Florida and Texas on channels allocated for non-commercial educational broadcasting. WTCE-TV broadcasts from a transmitter in unincorporated southeastern Martin County (southwest of Hobe Sound).
While it has broadcast TBN programming for its entire history since signing on in May 1990, WTCE was not originally intended to be a Christian television station. The construction permit was obtained in 1986 by a group which sought to start a public television station for Fort Pierce. Unable to raise federal grant money to build the station, it sold the permit to an affiliate of Palm Beach Atlantic College (PBAC) at the end of 1987. PBAC intended to build WTCE as the first in a series of new non-commercial stations across South Florida. However, despite coming weeks away from launch and announcing programming, a financial crunch left PBAC without the cash to begin broadcasting. TBN had provided the equipment used to start the station, so PBAC sold the station to TBN despite an earlier agreement with the owner of Miami public TV station WPBT.