WPXH-TV (channel 44) is a television station licensed to Hoover, Alabama, United States, serving the Birmingham area as an affiliate of Ion Television. The station is owned by Inyo Broadcast Holdings, and maintains offices on Golden Crest Drive in Birmingham and a transmitter atop Red Mountain, near the city's southern edge. History As a satellite of WTTO and WDBB The station traces its creation to issues involving independent station WDBB (channel 17) in Tuscaloosa, which was looking to increase its profile in central Alabama. When that station signed on in October 1984, at a time when cable television still did not have much penetration in the region, WDBB faced problems in trying to improve its coverage throughout the central part of the state, as its signal was nowhere near strong enough to cover the northern half of the market, particularly areas to the northeast of Birmingham proper. Although WDBB's founding owner, Dubose Broadcasting, invested heavily in the station and acquired a strong inventory of syndicated programming, the signal's inability to reach most of central Alabama put WDBB at a severe disadvantage against the area's other major independent, WTTO (channel 21) in Birmingham, which had early on established itself as one of the strongest independent stations in the Deep South and the United States as a whole. DuBose found a solution when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded the company a construction permit to launch a television station in Gadsden on UHF channel 44. That station signed on in April 1986 as WNAL-TV, originally operating as a full-time satellite station for the northern half of the market—specifically, areas to the east of downtown Birmingham—that could not receive the WDBB signal. Shortly before WNAL signed on, DuBose reached an agreement with the Fox Broadcasting Company to become the network's charter affiliate for central Alabama after WTTO turned down an offer to join the network. WDBB further strengthened its hand by using its forthcoming status as a network affiliate to make a concerted effort to improve its reach in Birmingham by applying to transfer its city of license to Bessemer, southwest of Birmingham, which allowed it to build a new transmitter tower located closer to Birmingham that would provide a much stronger signal in the western portion of the city. WDBB and WNAL became a Fox charter affiliate when the network officially launched on October 9, 1986. As was the case with other