of a full-service station. Its new owners therefore would've had to convert it to digital to continue broadcasting after 6/12/2009. Often, the stations went dark on the June 12, 2009 analog shutdown date only to return to the air digitally under their new owners just before the June 2010 FCC expiry date of their digital TV construction permits. WNGS and WNYI are among this group. Equity's situation was unique due to its rapid and recent expansion. Many of its full-service stations were built during the last few years of digital transition and therefore were in the position of needing to flash-cut to digital in 2009 or cease operation. Established full-service broadcasters (who signed on before the start of transition) had (with rare exception) been required to operate existing digital simulcasts on another channel for several years, so their digital equipment was therefore already in place long before the 2008 recession and the 2009 analog TV shutdown. Several Ion Television stations which signed on when digital licenses began to be issued in the early 2000s did the reverse of Equity, declining to build out redundant and costly analog facilities which would only be used for a few years, and signing them on exclusively as digital-only stations which were located within the core of their market area, despite losing out on analog viewership in their early histories. The former Equity full-service stations therefore represented the single largest block of stations to go dark on the June 12, 2009 digital transition date. C.A.S.H. system A trait unique to Equity Media Holdings Corporation was their usage of a centralized group-wide hub (called by Equity the Central Automated Satellite Hub, or , system) where all production, programming, and master control is handled from a facility adjacent to the company's headquarters. Though such hubbing is done on regional scales for many groups, no other company had done it to the scale and magnitude of Equity and C.A.S.H. Various C.A.S.H. stations were available free-to-air throughout North America on Ku band via Galaxy 18 (123°W) or on C band via Galaxy 3C (95°W). The feeds were in a format intended to be fed directly to a terrestrial television transmitter with no further studio processing. Satellite transponder space was rented from Intelsat, which claimed as of December 2008 to be owed over $580,000. As much of the free-to air satellite programming in North America consists of ethnic-language or specialised