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WAWW-LD

WAWW-LD (channel 30) is a low-power television station licensed to serve Rochester, New York, United States. The station is owned by Squirrel Broadcasting Company, a joint venture of James Smisloff and New York radio and TV station owner Craig Fox. Its main subchannel broadcasts HSN.

Hometown Vision, Inc., received a construction permit on July 31, 1989, to build a new low-power TV station on channel 38 in Rochester with call sign W38AW. Construction began by year's end on the new station's studios on Monroe Avenue.^[3] Test broadcasts began April 20, 1990, with All News Channel as a primary program source and the station filling the last 30 minutes of each hour with local and national syndicated shows.^[4] The station's fare also included dubbed South American soap operas, 1920s movies, and professional wrestling.^[5] Programming from HSN began to appear on W38AW in 1994.^[6]

In 1995, Hometown Vision sold W38AW for $125,000 to Kaleidoscope Affiliates of Little Rock, Arkansas.^[7] Kaleidoscope owned a service known as "America's Disability Channel", which channel 38 began to air as Kaleidoscope's 16th such station; the service included programs with audio description for the visually impaired and closed captioning for the hearing impaired.^[8] The call letters were changed to WAWW-LP in December 1995, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) permitted the use of conventional four-letter call signs by low-power television stations. Kaleidoscope Affiliates changed its name in 1998 to Equity Broadcasting Corporation. Equity then sold WAWW-LP to Venture Technologies Group in January 2002.^[9]

After moving to channel 20 in 2005 due to displacement by the digital facility of WKBW-TVinBuffalo, Squirrel acquired WAWW-LP from Venture for $10,000.^[10] It continued to broadcast in analog until the final shut-off date for low-power stations in the United States, July 13, 2021,^[11] and resumed broadcasting in digital for the first time by the start of December.^[12]

• Facility details for Facility ID 27573 (WAWW-LD) in the FCC Licensing and Management System