Mississippi–Alabama border. The move benefited all of the major Birmingham stations as it increased their available viewership in the three cities and resulted in the newly expanded market's placement in Nielsen's national market rankings jumping by twelve spots from 51st to 39th place. In May 1999, WNAL disaffiliated from CBS, and converted into an independent station targeting Anniston, Gadsden and surrounding areas. The CBS affiliation rights for Central Alabama were then ceded exclusively to WIAT, which became the network's sole affiliate for the enlarged Birmingham market. The station finally became a Pax TV owned-and-operated station on August 1, 1999. Sometime in early 2019, WPXH changed its city of license from Gadsden to Hoover. Newscasts Unlike other former independent stations and Fox affiliates that joined a Big Three network displaced due to Fox's affiliation deals with longtime major network stations, WPXH-TV (as WNAL-TV) did not invest in its own news department after it was affiliated with CBS in September 1996. Instead of local news programming, WNAL opted to air religious programming on weekday mornings before CBS This Morning (as well as the CBS Morning News) and at 10:00 p.m., and syndicated comedy and drama series at 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. In February 1998, the station entered into a news share agreement with Birmingham CBS affiliate WIAT (which temporarily shut down its news department the month prior, as part of a reboot of its news department in an effort to increase the persistently low ratings of its news programming), in which it would simulcast that station's nightly 5:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts; the WIAT news simulcasts were dropped in May 1999, when channel 44 became an independent station. In September 2001, as a Pax TV owned-and-operated station, WPXH entered into a news share agreement with WVTM-TV as part of an overall corporate management agreement between Paxson Communications and NBC. Under the agreement, WPXH-TV began airing rebroadcasts of WVTM's 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts on a half-hour tape delay (at 6:30 and 10:30 p.m.) each Monday through Friday night. The newscasts were discontinued after the 10:00 p.m. news rebroadcast on June 30, 2005, as Paxson had decided to end the news share agreements for its owned-and-operated stations upon Pax's rebranding as i: Independent Television. Technical information Subchannels The station's digital signal is multiplexed: Analog-to-digital conversion WPXH-TV signed on its digital signal on UHF channel 45 in November 2002. The station shut down its