due to Lake Erie's heavy "trop effect" amplifying their signal across northern Indiana and lower Michigan. Until 2021, the station's studios were located on North Flint Road, straddling the city line between Milwaukee and Glendale, and the same facility was also the studio for WTPX-TV, the Ion station in the Wausau market. In October of that year with the 2019 repeal of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s Main Studio Rule, Ion Media officially registered its studio facility (along with most Ion-owned stations) as the Scripps Center in Cincinnati. The same month, Green Bay sister station WGBA-TV launched Ion as its fifth subchannel, with the affiliation moving from WBAY-TV. Purchase by Scripps On September 24, 2020, it was announced that the Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps Company, owner of NBC affiliate WTMJ-TV (channel 4), would purchase Ion Media for $2.65 billion, with financing from Berkshire Hathaway. With this purchase, Scripps divested 23 Ion-owned stations, with WPXE-TV kept and becoming a sister station to WTMJ-TV, as there were no regulatory complications within the Milwaukee market which prevented such a duopoly. The sale was completed on January 7, 2021. Programming The station had a past joint sales agreement (JSA) with WTMJ-TV under Journal ownership that resulted from that station's affiliated network, NBC, having a stake in Paxson Communications/Pax TV; this resulted in the two stations sharing programming (such as Martha Stewart Living and repeats of preseason Green Bay Packers games produced for WTMJ, and live games during the 2004 Summer Olympics, which aired on WPXE), WPXE airing repeats of WTMJ's evening newscasts for several years, and WTMJ selling advertising time for WPXE. This early agreement was discontinued on July 1, 2005 after Pax TV rebranded as i: Independent Television. The station airs the entire Ion schedule and since the repeal of the Main Studio Rule, it carries the network without any local content outside an hourly station identification, nor is the station currently used by WTMJ to carry pre-empted NBC and local programming. Technical information Subchannels The station's digital signal is multiplexed: Analog-to-digital conversion WPXE-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 55, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal continued to broadcast on its pre-transition UHF channel 40. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual