Mr. Overmyer was planning a group of UHF stations to be part of the Overmyer Network which was intended to begin programming in 1967. The Pittsburgh station call letters were changed to WECO-TV for one of his daughters, Elizabeth Clark Overmyer. Channel 53 remained silent for nearly 15 years, it returned to the air under new owners U.S. Communications Corporation on February 1, 1969 as independent station WPGH-TV. It was jointly owned by the U.S. Communications Corporation (a subsidiary of AVC Corporation) station group of Philadelphia holding an 80% interest and the remaining 20% by D.H. Overmyer. Mr. Overmyer had previously sold the majority interest (80%) in his construction permits for stations in Atlanta, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Houston to AVC on March 28, 1967, with FCC approval of their sale coming December 8, 1967. None of the stations were on the air at the time of their sale to AVC. U.S. Communications also operated WPHL-TV in Philadelphia, WATL-TV in Atlanta, WXIX-TV in Cincinnati and KEMO-TV (now KOFY-TV) in San Francisco. WPGH-TV signed on from its new studio and transmitter location at 750 Ivory Avenue, just north of the city of Pittsburgh. This location had been the home of another Pittsburgh station, WENS, which went off the air in 1957. WPGH-TV still broadcasts from this location today. To overcome the UHF terrain problem that plagued WKJF-TV, WPGH was only the second station to use the most powerful UHF-TV transmitter available at that time, an RCA 110 kW model TTU-110. Despite excellent signal quality and a well-programmed lineup, financial problems continued to trouble the station, leading U.S. Communications Corporation to take WPGH-TV off the air on August 16, 1971. As an independent station (1974–1986) Under technical leadership of chief engineer Robert Boyd, broadcast engineer James G. Miller, and others, the station was repaired and updated in 1973. WPGH-TV was finally back on-air for good on January 14, 1974, after being sold again in December 1973 to Pittsburgh Telecasting, Inc., a company headed by Leon Crosby, who had acquired off-the-air San Francisco station KEMO-TV just two years before. Crosby had been working on the deal for more than a year before the sale was finalized. Coincidentally, KEMO-TV, like WPGH-TV, had been a U.S. Communications property. Initially, the station broadcast for 10 hours daily, beginning at around 2 p.m. The station gradually added more hours to its programming lineup, broadcasting about 18