WSET-TV (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Lynchburg, Virginia, United States, serving as the ABC affiliate for the Roanoke–Lynchburg market. The station is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, and has studios on Langhorne Road in Lynchburg; its transmitter is located atop Thaxton Mountain, near Thaxton, Virginia. History Channel 13 began operations on February 8, 1953, as WLVA-TV from a transmitter on Tobacco Row Mountain west of Sweet Briar. The station was owned by Lynchburg Broadcasting Corporation, which also owned WLVA radio (580 AM). WLVA-TV also served Charlottesville, where residents reported good reception during testing, from this transmitter site. The station was originally a CBS affiliate, but also carried programs from ABC, NBC, and DuMont as well. By the end of 1954, Roanoke and Lynchburg had been collapsed into a single market. Accordingly, channel 13 moved its transmitter and tower to Evington, Virginia in 1954 in an attempt to better serve Roanoke and the western part of the market. Since Roanoke was already served by NBC affiliate WSLS-TV (channel 10), WLVA-TV opted to become a primary ABC affiliate—Virginia's first, and the longest-tenured south of Washington, D.C. WLVA-TV and WSLS-TV split CBS programming until WDBJ-TV (channel 7) signed on from Roanoke in 1955. For most of its first 30 years on the air, channel 13 provided spotty coverage to the western part of the market because of this transmitter location, which still provided a city-grade signal to Lynchburg but was roughly from Roanoke proper. The station made numerous requests to move its transmitter closer to the city. However, they were all turned down by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) due to concerns about interference with co-channel WLOS-TV in Asheville, North Carolina and WOWK-TV in Huntington, West Virginia; in particular, the FCC believed that the Roanoke–Lynchburg and Huntington–Charleston markets were close enough that the two channel 13 transmitters had to be as far apart as possible to avoid interference. Its signal was so weak in Roanoke that ABC granted an affiliation to a second station in the market, WRFT-TV (channel 27), from 1966 through 1975. In the early 1960s, the station set up translator W05AA to improve its signal in Roanoke. WLVA-TV was not alone in installing low-VHF Roanoke translators; the early 1960s also saw W02AE put on the air to translate WSLS-TV and W04AG put on the air to translate WDBJ-TV. In 1970, WLVA-TV sought to move its transmitter to